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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



ABOLISHED RITES, 



OR 



SPIRITUAL, NOT CEREMONIAL 
WORSHIP. 



BY 

a/h. gottsohai 



Eighth Edition. 



ADDRESS 

The Christian Union, 

250 HUMMEL ST., 

HARRISBURG, PENN'A. 

1909. 



&c* 



Copyright, 1908, 

BY 

AMOS H. GOTTSCHALL. 



©CU256229 



PREFACE. 



We ask for a careful reading- of this little book, and 
hope that its contents will be prayerfully considered 
in the light of the New Testament. 

Concerning the observance of rites and ceremonies, 
it may be said: " Let not him that eateth despise him 
that eateth not ; and let not him which eateth not 
judge him that eateth: for God hath received him. 
* * * Let every man be fully persuaded in his own 
mind." — Rom. 14:3,5. The reader may well say: 

" Why, these are the very views entertained by the 
Quakers." "Yes," we reply, ' they are, and in this 
their doctrine we indorse them. Does not the Chris- 
tian world in general recognize the Quakers as being 
a godly and spiritual-minded people?" 

If w T e have not repented of sin, believed in the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and are not living a holy life, merely ob- 
serving ordinances or setting them aside is nothing. 
"For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth 
anything, nor uncircumcision ; but faith which worketh 
by love. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision 
availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new crea- 
ture. And as many as walk according to this rule, 
peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of 
God." — Gal. s:6;6:is,i6. 

Abolished Rites has passed through various edi- 
tions since 1887, and the more we test its teaching by 
the New Testament, the more are we convinced that 

(3) 



4 PREFACE. 

God, who is a Spirit, should be worshiped in spirit 
and in truth, and not through rites and ceremonies. 

In the preparation of this work we have gleaned 
from a wide field of literature on the subject, manifold 
authors and works have been quoted, from the Second 
and Third Centuries on down. In a book of this size 
quotations so numerous must necessarily be condensed; 
so from each author or work we have usually inserted 
briefly, without the use of asterisks where matter has 
been omitted. Many of the Christians from whom 
the quotations have been made were non-observers of 
ordinances, while others, though they may have stood 
identified with those who observed rites and ceremo- 
nies, or may themselves have observed them, still 
prove by their words that they believed them neither to 
embody saving" merit, nor to be essential to a holy life. 

A. H. GOTTSCHALL, 

Harrisburg, Pa., Feb. 23, 1909. 



ABOLISHED RITES. 



" The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth 
came by Jesus Christ. " — John 1:17. 

If Christ abolished types and shadows, why should 
we still observe them? If we are complete in Christ 
alone by faith, why should we still cling to fleshy em- 
blems? These are searching questions, which will not 
be lightly dismissed by the sincere and spiritual- 
minded believer. 

The great Head of the Church said to the woman at 
the well: "The true worshippers shall worship the Father 
in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to 
worship Him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship 
Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth/' — 
John 4-23,24. 

Every child of God knows that he received Christ 
by faith, and not in, through, or by any perishable 
ordinance. Paul most emphatically says: "As ye 
have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so 

WALK YE IN HIM." Col. 2:6. 

It is a mistake to teach that completeness in Christ 
by faith is not sufficient, but that some rite, ceremony, 
or type, administered by human hands, is necessary to 
completeness and obedience. 

As well might an artist try to improve on the 
grandeur of the star-studded canopy of the heavens 
with his puny brush as a man endeavor to better the 
finished work of Christ in efforts to make a man more 
meet for the inheritance of the Saints in light by dip- 
ping his body into water, or inviting him to partake 
of perishable emblems. 

(5) 



6 ABOLISHED RITES. 

When God has finished the work of a soul's salva- 
tion, by the mighty agency of His Holy Spirit, through 
the new birth, and most emphatically teaches in His 
Word that in the acceptance of His Son as our Saviour, 
and an implicit soul rest upon the vicarious atonement 
of Christ, we are complete y who shall say we need 
something that a man can add to make us more com- 
plete or acceptable? 

Our worship is now " not of the letter (the law), 
but of the spirit : for the letter killeth, but the spirit 
giveth life" — 2 Cor. 3:6. " But the natural man re- 
ceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God : for they 
are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, 
because they are spiritually discerned" — 1 Cor. 2:14. 

There need be no literal, fleshly eating, drinking, and 
washings, or baptisms, now in the worship of God, 
but we should feast upon Christ BY FAITH. Like 
the Israelites while in the desert, we should now " all 
eat the same spiritual meat) And . . drink the same 
spiritual drink : for they drank of that spiritual Rock 
that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.'' — 
1 Cor. 10:3,4. 

" For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink : 

BUT RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND PEACE, AND JOY IN THE 

Holy Ghost. For HE THAT IN THESE THINGS 
SERVETH CHRIST IS ACCEPTABLE TO GOD." 
— Rom. 14:17,18. 

4 * It is a good thing that the heart be established with 
grace; not with meats, WHICH HAVE NOT 
PROFITED THEM THAT HAVE BEEN OCCU- 
PIED THEREIN. We have an altar, whereof they 
have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle." — 
Heb. 13:9,10. 

Many Christians believe that carnal ordinances are 
obligatory now : many others do not. But if we have 
the spirit of Christ, we will not ignore and disfellow- 
ship those who differ from us in respect to these out- 
ward, earthly things. 

It we reject a child of God because he does not see 
as we do, and because he clings to rituals which we 



AB0L*5fi£D RITES. 7 

plainly see have been abolished, we are not manifest- 
ing- the right spirit. On the other hand, if the advo- 
cates of ordinances persecute us because we are satis- 
fied with Christ alone, and reject all fleshly em- 
blems w T hich He abolished, they prove that they are 
occupied with something: besides Christ, that they lack 
His mind and spirit, and at the same time show that 
the observance of fleshly ceremonies has not imparted 
to them the fruits of the Spirit. Every intelligent 
Bible Christian will acknowledge that Jesus Christ 
came into the world to save sinners, and that we are 
saved alone by appropriating- to ourselves through 
faith the redeeming merits of His atonement for us on 
the cross. Then why should we ignore or denounce 
one another because we do not see alike in what are, 
at best, but non-essentials, in the great matter of salva- 
tion? 

It is an evident fact that religious ignorance, hatred, 
and persecution usually g-o hand in hand, and nowhere, 
perhaps, are these traits more prominent than in or- 
dinance advocates. Because Stephen preached down 
rites and ceremonies, and held up Jesus as being- all-suf- 
ficient, he was stoned to death; Acts 6: 13, 1457:59, 60. 

The pages of martyrology prove that during- the 
earlier centuries of the Church a countless host of 
worthies passed up to join the blood-washed throng by 
way of fire, rack, knife, water, and every invention of 
cruelty and murder that religious monsters could in- 
vent; and for the very reason that they refused to 
make an idol of bread and wine. Not less than two 
hundred and eighty people were publicly burned, or 
otherwise killed, in England, in 1555 and the three 
years following, principally because they differed with 
their religious enemies about the bread and w r ine. 
And of the thousands of people said to have been killed 
directly or indirectly by the fearful persecutions of the 
Catholic Church in various countries, many of these 
were slaughtered because of their non-conformity in the 
sacraments, as history amply proves, and as is shown 
in other parts of this work. 



8 ABOLISHED RITES. 

How much in the dark are people who fancy that 
they must consume a bite of bread and a sip of wine 
as a means of remembering- the Lord, when His very 
last messag-e to the Church is: " Behold, I stand at 
the door, and knock : if any man hear my voice, and 
open the door, / will come in to him, and will sup 
with him, and he with me." — Rev. 3:20. 

" Ye are the temple of the living God ; as God hath 

Said, I WILL DWELL IN THEM, AND WALK IN THEM." — 

2 Cor. 6:16. If the Lord, then, on His own assertion, 
dwells and walks in His children in spirit, how un- 
reasonable it is to say that in order to remember Him 
we must observe a fleshly eating and drinking ! 

The Catholic Church maintains that the number of 
ordinances, or sacraments are seven. When Luther 
and the other early Reformers left Rome they carried 
two or three of these ordinances along, and left the 
rest behind. No man or set of men have all the light 
and truth, and these early Reformers made a grand 
stride from the yoke of dead rites and ceremonies in 
dropping four or five of the husks of Catholicism, 
especially in that dark day of Romish ignorance and 
superstition. Is it any wonder that later on other dis- 
cerning Christians should also drop the other two or 
three as the Quakers and others have done and still do? 
Many centuries before either Luther or the Quakers 
appeared, even from the First or Second Centuries on 
down, as history shows, God has had a people who, 
discarding the borrowed rites of Judaism, strove to 
accept Christ as the end of all types and shadows, and 
aimed to be satisfied with the baptism of the Spirit, 
and to be fed by faith upon Him who is the bread of 
life and to seek for that worship which is spiritual 
and not ritualistic. 

Some Christians insist that in the act of observing 
ordinances they show their humility, and thus make a 
sacrifice. To the honest, devoted soul there is comfort 
in the thought that duty is being performed, yet their 
idea of duty may not have truth for its foundation. 
Others claim to receive a blessing in the observance 






ABOLISHED RITES. 9 

of ordinances. This may, in some cases, be true. 
There is always a comfort and satisfaction in doing 
what is believed to be right. Loyalty to convictions 
brings inward composure. But that is no proof 
against error. Paul lived in good conscience, and 
thought he was doing God service while cruelly per- 
secuting the Saints. On this point Burgess well says : 

"When a man performs that which his judgment 
calls upon him to do, he finds great serenity of mind. 
You must never judge of the truth of any way in re- 
ligion by the comfort and peace of conscience you 
find therein; for all Turks, Jews and heretics have 
much quietness of conscience in discharging that tra- 
ditional religion they are brought up in, and would be 
much troubled in conscience to deny or apostatize 
from their way." "This only would I learn of you, 
Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by 
the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish ? having begun 
in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the 
flesh?" — Gal. 3:2,3. 

" For Thou desirest not sacrifice ; else would I give 
it : Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacri- 
fices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a 
contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise." — 
Psa. 51:16,17. 

" I am the living bread which came down from 
Heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live 
forever. * * * It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the 
flesh profiteth nothing : the words that I speak 
unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." — John 
6:51,63. 

We have nothing but Christian love for those who 
conscientiously believe that in the observance of out- 
ward rites they are obeying arid pleasing God, nor 
would we for a moment tolerate the idea of anything 
so unchristian as holding aloof from them because of 
their doctrine and practice in these things. No; all 
who know Jesus to the pardoning of their sins are our 
dear brethren and sisters, irrespective of the obser- 
vance or non-observance of ordinances. 



10 ABOLISHED RITES. 

We can, we trust, worship God in Spirit and in 
truth by their side, but on the other hand, our freedom 
in the Spirit must not be fettered by their rituals. 
Paul, after turning" from the rites of the law to the 
gospel of grace, labored in harmony with some who 
seemed still to have been of the circumcision; see Col. 
4:7-12, but he was not bound by their practice. The 
poet gives expression to the same sentiments in the 
old hymn : 

" We'll not bind our brother's conscience, 
This to God alone is free ; 
Nor contend for non-essentials, 
But in Christ united be." 

" Here's my hand, my heart, and spirit ; 
Now in fellowship I'll give ; 
Now we love and peace inherit, 

Show the world how Christians live." 

The idea that God insists upon a literal water bap- 
tism, a literal washing of feet, a literal table, a literal 
cup, a literal feast of bread and wine, in a spiritual 
dispensation — and that, too, as a means of following, 
imitating or remembering Him who promises to be 
ever in and with us spiritually — seems absurd to a 
spiritual-minded man or woman, providing, of course, 
that light upon these truths has shown into the soul. 
We receive light upon divine things only as we want it, 

ONLY AS WE CAN BEAR IT, ONLY AS WE WILL 

WALK IN IT. 

It is an undeniable fact that too often as Christians 
grow formal and loose in soul-life they try to make up 
for it by zealously observing rituals. But as believers, 
like Samuel, "grow before the Lord" (1 Sam. 2:21), 
they see the hollowness of clinging to outward cere- 
monies. They are satisfied with Christ, and having 
Him, they would not (knowingly) dishonor Him by 
allowing anything emblematic to take His place. 
" Now we are delivered from the law, that being dead 
wherein we were held ; that we should serve in 



ABOLISHED RITES. II 

NEWNESS OF SPIRIT, and NOT IN THE OLDNESS OF THE 

letter/' — Rom. 7:6. 

If people, when being- occupied with bread made by 
the hands of a woman, and wine made by the hands 
of a man, would, like Peter (after observing- a type), 
"remember the word of the Lord" (Acts 11:16), they 
mig-ht more fully grasp the meaning, and more fully 
enjoy the reality of partaking of the real Lord's Supper 
which Jesus Himself invites us to in Rev. 3:20, where 
He says : " Behold, / stand at the door, and knock: if 
any man hear my voice, and opeii the door, I will come 
in to him, a?id will sup with him, and he with me." 

If we have Christ in spirit, why should we cling- to 
any perishable remembrance of Him? Must we con- 
sume a bite of bread and a sip of wine as a means of 
remembering - Him whose Word declares that " Ye are 
the temple of the livi?ig God; as God hath said, I will 
dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their 
God, and they shall be my people." — 2 Cor. 6:16. If 
we really have Christ by faith, who is the end of every- 
thing typical, why should we still cling to the shadow? 

Rig-ht here is where many Christians make a mistake 
by adhering to that which was of the Mosaic dispensa- 
tion, and was never intended to be kept up by the 
Church in the g-ospel age. In Acts 15, nineteen years 
after Christ, the Gentiles were received without the 
law, or rather declared to be exempt from it, as they 
had never been under Judaism, but not the Israelites, 
for in Acts 21, twenty-seven years after the cross, the 
Jewish believers were keeping the law, and it is only 
first in Heb. 9:10, thirty-one years after the cross, that 
the law of types is plainly declared to be abolished. 

Some Christians seem slow to understand that the 
rituals of Moses were still observed by the New Testa- 
ment Christians for years after Christ, but the Xew 
Testament plainly declares the fact. Read the fifteenth 
and twenty-first chapters of Acts. In Acts 18:21 Paul 
said : " I must by all means keep this feast that cometh 
in Jerusalem/' and in Acts 20:6, he said: "And we 
sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened 



12 ABOLISHED RITES. 

bread." In Acts 24:18, he says, " Whereupon certain 
Jews from Asia found me purified in the temple. " So 
we see that Paul, with others, at this time, was still 
observing the law. 

" Before faith came, we were kept under the law, 
shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be re- 
vealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to 
bring- us unto Christ, that we might be justified by 
faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer 
under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of 
God by faith IN CHRIST JESUS."— Gal. 3:23,24,- 
25,26. 

Our ordinance brethren so often quote Matt. 11:13, 
(A. D. 31), " All the prophets and the law prophesied 
until John," and claim that this text virtually de- 
clares the abolishment of the Jewish types, but the 
text makes no such assertion ; Jesus, in Matthew 
23:2,3 (A. D. 33), moreover says, "The scribes and 
the Pharisees sit in Moses seat: All therefore whatso- 
ever they bid you observe, that observe and do.' 9 Again, 
Mark 1:44, " Show thyself to the priest, arid offer for 
thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded, 
for a testimony unto them." Here we see that the 
Jewish law was still in force after John s appearance, 
and Jesus himself recognized it. 

Others say that the observance of Mosaic rituals 
actually ceased at the cross. Neither is correct, for 
we find the rites and ceremonies of the law zealously 
observed by the believing Jews for years after Calvary, 
as has already been shown. While Christ in very 
deed did abolish rites and ceremonies at the cross, the 
time for their actual cessation was not declared till Heb. 
9:10, thirty -one years later. 

" A testament is of force after men are dead: other- 
wise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth. 
— Heb. 9:17. The Christian Church, or dispensation, 
may, in a sense, be said to have grown out of the 
Jewish, and the washings, or baptisms, and the Pass- 
over Supper of that ceremonial system, seems to have 
been so implanted into the minds and customs of some, 



ABOLISHED RITE 13 

that they may not always have been fully dropped by 
all. Indeed in the Second and Third Centuries, as 
history asserts, there began a lapsing back into old 
customs, and a trust in ceremonies. This leaning 
toward Judaism and its ceremonies became more 
marked later on as Catholicism came to the front, 
especially from the Third Century on, and by this 
latter system rites and ceremonies were greatly in- 
creased and magnified. Many of the more modern 
Reformers never fully cut loose from the ceremonies 
of Judaism and Catholicism, but carried some of them, 
namely, water baptism and the supper, along out 
with them. 

This backward movement on the part of the Early 
Church is, as we find, first mentioned in history as ap- 
pearing in A. D. 140, 150, 175. Xeander, the great 
German ecclesiastical historian says : 

" Christianity having sprung to freedom out of the 
envelope of Judaism, had stripped off the forms in 
which it was first concealed. This evolution belonged 
more particularly to the Pauline position. The Jewish 
principles which had been vanquished, pressed in once 
more from another quarter. Humanity was as yet 
incapable of maintaining itself at that lofty position of 
pure spiritual religion. The Jewish position descended 
nearer to the mass. This recasting of the Christian 
spirit in the Old Testament form did not take place, it 
is true, everywhere uniformly alike. In general, the 
more men fell back from the evangelical to the Jewish 
point of view, the more must the original free constitu- 
tion of the communities, grounded in those original 
Christian views, become changed. We find Cyprian 
(A. D. 250) already completely imbued with the no- 
tions which sprung out of this confounding together of 
the different points of view of the Old and Xew Testa- 
ments. " 

Seemingly with the adoption of rites and ceremonies 
from Judaism in the Second Century, the Early Church 



14 ABOLISHED RITES. 

rapidly drifted into what later became Catholicism, 
cropping out more and more from the Third Century 
forward. The priesthood that came into power evi- 
dently seeing- that a code of rituals was advantageous 
in maintaining priestly prestige, rule and power, added 
ceremonies to their hearts' content, and seem to have 
convinced their following that it was all of Divine ap- 
proval. Baptismal regeneration, penance, purgatory, 
and the whole system of Popish emptiness, followed 
in course of time. 

Later on down the line of time, says D'Aubigne, the 
French historian, (died 1630): "Indulgences were 
more or less an extraordinary branch of Roman com- 
merce ; the sacraments were a staple commodity. The 
revenue they produced was of no small account." 

Mosheim, the great German ecclesiastical historian 
(died 1755) says : " It is certain that to religious wor- 
ship, both public and private, many rites were added, 
without necessity, and to the great offense of sober and 
good men. The principal cause of this I readily look 
for in the perverseness of mankind, who are more de- 
lighted with the pomp and splendor of external forms 
than with the true devotion of the heart ; and who 
despise whatever does not gratify their eyes and ears. 
Also, there is good reason to suppose that the Christian 
bishops multiplied sacred rites for the sake of rendering 
the Jews and the Pagans more friendly to them, for 
both had been accustomed to numerous and splendid 
ceremonies from their infancy, and had no doubt that 
they constituted an essential part of religion. 
Hence, when they saw the new religion to be destitute 
of such ceremonies they thought it too simple, and 
therefore despised it." 

" The simplicity of the worship which Christians of- 
fered to the Deity had given occasion to certain cal- 
umnies, spread abroad both by the Jews and Pagan 
priests. The Christians were pronounced atheists, be- 
cause they were destitute of temples, altars, victims, 



ABOLISHED RITES. » 1 5 

priests, and all the pomp in which the vulgar suppose 
the essence of religion to consist. To silence this ac- 
cusation the Christian doctors thought they must i?itro- 
duce some external rites, which would strike the 
sense of the people, so that they could maintain that they 
really had all those things of which Christians are 
charged with being destitute; though under different 
forms. Also, it was well known that in the books of 
the New Testament, various parts of the Christian 
religion are expressed by terms borrowed from the Jewish 
laws, and are in some measure compared with the Jewish 
rites. 

" In process of time, either from ignorance or mo- 
tives of policy, the majority maintained that such 
phraseology was not figurative, but accordant with 
the nature of things. Bishops were called high priests, 
and the presbyters, priests, and deacons, Levites. In a 
little time, those to whom these titles were given main- 
tained that they had the same rank and dignity , and pos- 
sessed the same rights and privileges with those who 
bore these titles under the Mosaic dispensation. Also, 
from the Greek Mysteries the Christians were led to 
claim similar mysteries, and they began to apply the 
terms used in the Pagan mysteries to Christian institu- 
tions, particularly baptism and the Lord' s Supper! 
They also introduced the other rites designated in those 
terms, a?id a large part of the Christian observances of 
this (Second) Century had the appearance of the Pagan 
mysteries!" 

Dr. Robison, the Baptist historian, on this line says: 
Unconnected as baptism may seem to be with all this, 
it was, however, the chief instrument of acquiring power 
and producing a revolution in favor of pontifical domin- 
ion. By this the hierarchy was formed, and by this, 
and not by argument, was chiefly supported. Pope 
Sylvester dedicated the first edifice to the Romanizing 
( Judaizing) party, November 9. It was named after 
Solomon's temple, to distinguish it from idol temples. 
Also, for the same reason, a painting or statue of 



1 6 * ABOLISHED RITES. 

Jesus was placed there ! — probably the true origin of 
pictures, images, and all ecclesiastical idolatry." 

"A wooden table there was called an altar, and 
they denominated those who officiated there Levites. 
The same effects which the baptistery had produced at 
Rome followed in all other cities, as Venice, Naples, 
Florence, Pisa, Milan, Boulogne, Viterba, Modena, 
Verona, Ravenna, Aquileia, and many other cities. 
The priest of the congregation that claimed the bap- 
tisteries became a prelate ; the other priests in the 
city his clergy ; some of them were called his ' cardi- 
nal ' priests and deacons, chiefly because they assisted 
him to administer baptism. From these sprang suf- 
fragans, prebendaries, canons! chapters, conclaves and 
councils. Cardinals derived their titles from baptismal 
churches." 

" The city fashion of building baptisteries was, 
as all fashions are, soon imitated by country towns. 
The bishop of the city baptismal church inspected 
and regulated the affairs of the town churches, and 
provided them with teachers and administrators of 
ordinances, and generally supplied them with oils 
and ointments from the metropolitan baptistery. The 
fetching of this chrism at Easter from the city bap- 
tistery, became in time an evidence to prove the de- 
pendence of these baptisteries on that in the city. The 
bishop who supplied the baptisteries acquired the most 
parishes. It was the baptistery, precisely, and neither 
the parsonage house nor the church, which constituted 
the title to the whole. For this reason baptismal 
churches are called Titular churches. All these bap- 
tisteries were dedicated to John the Baptist (an ante- 
Christian, Jewish priest) and not to Christ." 

Dr, J. T. Hendricks in his work on baptism says : 
4 'The religion of Christ was a religion of principles. 
The religion of the Fathers, even in the Second Cen- 
tury, became a religion of sacraments or ceremonies, 
as the Catholic religion now is. The first symptom of 
decay in religion, at that time, was, as it ever has been, 



ABOLISHED RITES. \J 

a revival of the ritual or ceremonial part. Principles 
and sacraments in religion never can be kept abreast 
of each other, they will not remain in a state of equi- 
poise, the spiritual part will be thrown back, and 
retire, and the merest formalities and grossest super- 
stitions will follow. Xo sooner than Christ had died, 
even before His immediate disciples died, this leaven 
of Judaism began to work itself into the Church, and 
did leaven the whole lump, and continued down to the 
Reformation. " 

Some Christians, and many of them well meaning, 
erroneously teach that Jesus instituted carnal ordi- 
nances for His Church to observe during this dispensa- 
tion ; but let us observe what God's Word says, 
whether it conflicts with the popular belief or not. 
It is truth that we must deal with, and not what even 
many good and well-meaning people may think, do, 
or teach. ".Christ is the e?id of the law for righteous- 
ness to every one that believeth." — Rom. 10:4. 

" Having abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the 
law of commandments contained in ordi?ia?ices" — Eph. 

2:15. 

" Which stood only i?i meats and drinks, and divers 
washings (Greek and German, baptisms), and carnal 
ordinances, imposed on them until the time of 
Reformation." — Heb. 9:10. 

* Blotting ont the handwriting of ordinances that 

WAS AGAINST US, WHICH WAS CONTRARY TO US, and took 

it ont of the way, NAILING IT TO HIS CROSS." 
— Col. 2:14. 

" Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudi- 
ments of the world, WHY, as though living in the 
world, are ve subject to ordinances, (TOUCH NOT; 
TASTE NOT; HANDLE NOT; Which are all to 
perish with the using;) after the commandments and 
doctrines of men?" — Col. 2:20,21,22. 

Dr. E. B. Turner, a Congregational minister, in 
a discourse entitled "Forms not Religion," says: 



13 ABOLISHED RITES. 

" No part of the Mosaic religion was designed to be 
perpetuated but its principles. Her forms and cere- 
monies having" now become of no importance, have 
become obsolete. The entire absence of any prescribed 
forms in the New Testament indicate it. If any par- 
ticular external modes of exemplifying and perpetuat- 
ing the doctrines of the Gospel had been designed, 
would they not have been the subject of express in- 
struction? Of what use are principles, which cannot, 
through defect of the means of applying them, be 
made of practical utility? And if any fixed forms 
were intended to be established, and to be made per- 
petual in all countries and ages, is it probable that we 
should be left without any written formularies on the 
subject? Who will undertake to show that there are 
any such formularies in the New Testament? Who 
will say that they are so clearly defined that ' he who 
runneth may read? ' " 

Jesus says : — " A new commandment I give unto you, 
That ye love one another ; as I have loved you, that 
ye also love one another. By this shall all men know 
that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to an- 
other."— John 13:34,35. 

Any one may observe fleshly ordinances, but the 
new commandment of ■ Love one another" only Chris- 
tians who have the spirit of Christ can observe. Jesus 
plainly declared that upon the two commandments, 
" Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with 
all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And * * * thy 
neighbor as thyself, * * * hang all the law and the 
prophets." — Matt. 22:37,39,40. 

Again in Mark 12:31, concerning these two com- 
mandments of love to God and man, it is said, " There 
is none other commandment greater than these" 

It is true that many godly men and women believe 
in these outward things, and observe them in good 
faith, not realizing that Jesus forever put away typical 
worship, and that the New Testament declares legal 
observances blotted out. We are responsible only for 



ABOLISHED RITES. 19 

what we see and understand, but when light dawns, 
then we are responsible for our use of it. 

On the other hand, there always was, in all prob- 
ability, a " little flock" who worshiped God in spirit 
and in truth, ignoring - outward, fleshly ceremonies, 
and in all likelihood, there will always be " a little 
flock " of similar heart and mind. But if we have the 
spirit of Christ, we will not reject those who differ 
from us upon these non-essentials. It is not observing 
ordinances, or laying- them aside, that makes a Chris- 
tian, but it is having" the new birth — the life of God 
within the soul. 

Chambers Encyclopedia says : " Some early Chris- 
tian sects appear to have rejected baptism on grounds 
somewhat similar to those on which it is rejected by 
Quakers at the present day, who explain the passages 
which relate to it symbolically, and insist that a spirit- 
ual baptism is the only real baptism of Christians." 

Though not a Quaker, or a member of the Society 
of Friends, we indorse this their doctrine, and certainly 
love and respect them for the spirit of Christ, the 
uprightness of life, and the peaceful and benevolent 
characteristics so universally attributed to them by 
Christians in general. The first Quakers landed in 
America, at Boston, July, 1656, and disseminated their 
views with zeal and success. William Penn, Quaker 
preacher and author, the founder and first Governor 
of Pennsylvania, and the City of Philadelphia, might 
be called the leading representative of the Friends in 
America in his day. 

The Quakers teach salvation to be obtained only 
through the death and merits of Christ. They accept 
the Bible as the work of inspiration and rule of faith 
and life, believing that in this, the new covenant dis- 
pensation, the baptism which embodies saving merit is 
not that of water, but that of the Spirit ; and that the 
true communion is not partaking of bread and wine, 
but spiritual feasting upon Christ by faith. 



20 ABOLISHED RITES. 

The census of 1880 gives -the number of Quakers or 
Friends in the United States as 72,098, and the number 
of meeting" places as 736. A number of these " meet- 
ing houses," as the Quakers call their church buildings, 
are situated in Philadelphia, one of the early cradles 
of Quakerism in America and perhaps still one of their 
strongholds in this country. Many Quakers, too, are 
found in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and in 
other countries. 

John Wesley, in his diary, Aug. 10, 1739, says : "I 
had the satisfaction of conversing with a Quaker. O, 
may those in every persuasion, who are of this spirit, 
increase a thousand- fold." In the same diary he says: 
"Thursday, Sept. 22, 1743: As we were riding 
through a village called Stickpath, one stopped me in 
the street and asked, ' Is not thy name John Wesley?' 
Immediately two or three more came up and told me 
I must stop there. I did so, and before we had spoke 
many words, our souls took acquaintance with each 
other. I found they were Quakers, but that hurt not 
me ; seeing the love of God was in their hearts." 
Again Wesley says in his diary, of June 24, 1742: 
" I rode to Painswick, where in the evening I de- 
clared to all those who had been fighting and troubling 
one another about rites and ceremonies and modes of 
worship and opinions, ' The kingdom of God is not 
meat and drink, but RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND 
PEACE AND JOY IN THE HOLY GHOST.' " 
Again John Wesley says : " He that truly trusts in 
Christ cannot fall short of the grace of God, even 
though he were cut off from every outward ordinance 
— though he were shut up in the centre of the earth. 
There is no power in means ; separate from God it is 
a dry leaf — a shadow, and in itself a poor, dead, empty 
thing. My belief is no rule for another. I ask not 
of him with whom I would unite in love, are you of 
my church? of my congregation? If thou lovest God 
and all mankind, I ask no more ; give me thine hand. 
So far as in conscience thou canst (retaining still thine 



ABOLISHED RITES. 21 

own opinions) join with me in the work of God, and 
let us go hand in hand." 

Wesley's spirit and attitude towards the Quakers 
were certainly God-like, for the Scripture plainly de- 
clares : " Of a truth I perceive that God is ?io respecter 
of persons: But in every nation he that feareth Him, 
and worketh righteousxess, is accepted with him." 
— Acts 10:34,35. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, 
there is liberty. " — 2 Cor. 3:17. 

The Society of Friends, or Quakers, arose in Eng- 
land. Concerning" these people, ecclesiastical history 
says : 

"They spread very rapidly in Great Britain and 
Ireland, as well as largely in the American Colonies. 
Their great apostle and founder, George Fox, was a 
man of intense earnestness in his investigation of 
religious truth, willing to go wherever the truth, as he 
understood it, might lead him, and to bear any re- 
proach that might be laid on him because of his pro- 
fession. At first the followers of Fox called them- 
selves Seekers, as indicating their desire to discover 
the truth. The epithet Quakers was early applied to 
them by enemies as a term of derision and reproach. 
George Fox was unquestionably a good man, and 
sincerely aimed at discovering the primitive truths 
and practices which had been overlaid in the course of 
centuries. In his own manifold journeyings and 
preachings through the country he attracted many by 
his evident sincerity, no less than by his eloquence, 
and led them to embrace his views." 

" In 1647 he began his missionary career, and in 
eight years afterward ministers of the new society 
were spreading their doctrine in various parts of 
Europe, They endured with calm patience most 
grievous suffering and oppression. As many as thirty- 
four hundred of these earnest, God-fearing people were 
confined in noisome prisons, and many of them died 
as martyrs to their faith." 



22 ABOLISHED RITES. 

" Their meetings were broken up, their persons were 
assaulted, and they were treated with all forms of in- 
dignity and contempt. The society spread very rap- 
idly in England, and when William Penn founded the 
Colony of Pennsylvania, the cause extended under his 
influence on this Continent. In New England and 
other sections of the American Colonies, they became 
numerous. Strange as it seems, even in New England 
their trials were most severe; a godly woman and 
three men of culture and earnest piety were actually 
hanged on Boston Commons for their faith." 

Of course, the Quakers who arose in 1647 were not 
the first to discard the rites and ceremonies carried 
over from Judaism, and to advocate the worship of 
God in spirit and in truth, because history proves that 
from the early centuries on down there has been a 
people who maintained the same truth. 

The following brief extracts are gleaned from 
" Ritualism Dethroned" by William B. Orvis, (a 
college-trained Doctor of Divinity) published in 1875- 
1880. The work is probably the most able and com- 
plete one on the abolishment of rites and ceremonies 
ever issued. Its ancient and modern testimony as 
gleaned by its author in a wide field during his re- 
searches covering a period of one-third of a century, 
are very valuable. The work embodies 2 vols, of 754 
pages. 

The author died some years ago. Whether or not 
he has a monument of stone we cannot say, but he has 
left a monument in his work "Ritualism Dethroned" 
which we hope will never be obliterated, and we pray 
that the precious truths it embodies may ever have 
adherents. This Baptist Doctor of Divinity says : 

" Ordinances, by Protestants so called, are simply 
borrowed Judaisms, undefined as to time and manner 
in the early Christian Church (being pre-defined only 
by the law of Moses), contingent as to observance in 
the Early Church, and received from, and ranked with, 



ABOLISHED RITES. 23 

the other ceremonies of the prior dispensation ; and 
therefore are not positive institutions ', nor of any bind- 
ing" force in the Christian Church." 

"The writer was also a Pharisee of the Pharisees, 
made under the law of ritualism — a Baptist of the 
straitest sect and regular order, coming- with all the 
credentials of baptism, and ordination, and theologi- 
cal parchments, and of ritual observances according 
to the appointed order of sect worshiping — an Hebrew 
of the Hebrews, touching the ceremonial law. But 
all these he now counts loss for Christ and truth, and 
takes the ground that the Christian Dispensation 
knows no ordinances , or ritual law." 

" Christianity is, and must be, in the nature of 
things, a spiritual religion. Its seat and subject is the 
inner man! It is not in the letter, but in the spirit. 
Nothing outward or extrinsic strictly belongs to it. 
Its precepts and commands, each and all, inculcate 
principles, or the spread of principles to the heart- 
renovation, or spiritual regeneration of man/' 

"The circumstances of God's people in Palestine 
once demanded a Ceremonial Law, and that law was 
instituted, and inhered in a system we now term 
Judaism; but Christianity knows no such ceremonial 
law, no more than it knows the ceremonies of pagan 
worship which were cotemporary with Judaism. 
Christ, the Teacher and Redeemer of all, broke down 
all these ceremonial walls of partition/' 

"Towering walls of bigotry and sect are built 
around rituals, called ordinances, and sacraments, like 
the flaming sword around the tree of life, lest any man 
come, and eat and live. Ostensibly the wall is built, 
lest the sacrament be defiled, or its sanctity be 
trampled on, which mockery of pretense if there be 
amazement in Heaven, surely all Heaven stands 
amazed at such exclusion and sacrifice of souls, for 
whom Christ died, for the sake of saving a dead form 
— a ritual ! which thus proves a curse to all who so 
idolize it." 

" Dost thou think that God has commanded all 



24 ABOLISHED RITES. 

Saints to join some church that has a ritualistic door, 
and to pass through that door? If so, which is the 
church? Is it the Congregational Church? or the 
Baptist Church? or the Presbyterian Church? or the 
Episcopal Church? or the Methodist Church? or which 
of the forty or fifty extant orders of the Protestant 
Church? or the Greek, the Lutheran, or the Papal 
Churches? If Paul were to return to earth, which 
would he decide to be, the canonical Church? or Jesus, 
the Great Head? Perhaps, He would select (elect) 
your church and your baptism, and meekly inform all 
the others that they were not acceptable in His sight. 
Thinkest thou this, O, vain man and bigot? " 

" Christ's baptism of the Spirit is demonstratively 
purifying .and uniting, while ritual baptism and all 
sacramentarianism is as demonstratively the reverse. 
Eating Christ's body by faith in Him who is invisible 
(the Bread from Heaven), demonstratively gives life, 
while eating sacraments (bread of earthly elements), 
as demonstratively gives self-complacency, a censori- 
ous spirit, and divisive, and a false idea of the work 
and will of Christ. " 

" He is a poor student of the New Testament who 
does not see that therein the whole ritual, or cere- 
monial law of the Old Testament is set aside as cum- 
bersome, and as a thing of naught to the Christian 
Church? And if any writer will point to us where a 
ritual law is re-established in the same Testament, 
marking its form and outline, to the intent that it may 
be practically apprehended as thus far from God and 
no farther, and just to what extent (when, where and 
how) the will of Christ, the Great Head of the Chris- 
tian Church, would have us interested in it, we will 
meekly and thankfully sit at his feet and learn." 

"This talk about sacraments has no warrant in the 
New Testament. Is there any word in the New 
Testament that answers to the word sacraments, or 
declares who shall administer them? Is not the idea 
wholly Popish and priestly? Ordinances are named 
in the New Testament, but ever as Jewish, and to be 



ABOLISHED RITES. 2$ 

disregarded and renounced. And, when reassumed in 
after centuries, the appeal is not to Christ's, or apos- 
tolic authority, but to tradition. Of this we have 
abundant proof. It might be assumed in advance 
that a new dispensation (for all the world) would not 
be ritualistic like the old (the Jewish), and that Christ 
would not give a law to make bigots and sectarists, or 
to befool the unconverted with a vain hope of a ritual 
regeneration. Can any one assent to the proposition 
that the commission to convert the world was given a 
baptismal sheath? or that Christ's Spirit can be circum- 
scribed by a ritual? There can be no sacrament but 
spiritually feeding on Christ. No sacred shrines or 
fonts, or forms — souls sanctified only are sacred. The 
heavenly life is not run in the narrow mould of a creed, 
or guarded and guided and bounded by a rite. Christ 
has not put salvation at the mercy of human frailty 
and shortsightedness, or in the power of priestly arro- 
gance thus. No man's spiritual good is at the disposal 
of any administrator of rites." 

" Every student of history knows that strifes about 
who shall administer baptism, how they shall admin- 
ister baptism, and when they shall administer baptism, 
and what adjuncts shall attend it, have been rife for 
1700 years. He knows that baptism has been admin- 
istered in sanctuaries and out of sanctuaries ; by 
bishops, priests, and deacons ; to persons sick and 
well, living and dying ; infants and adults ; by affusion, 
by immersion, by sprinkling, by putting bodies into 
water, and applying water to bodies ; by trine immer- 
sion, and by single immersion ; by immersing with 
the face downward, and immersing with the face up- 
wards ; immersing persons naked, and immersing per- 
sons clothed ; sprinkling with blood, with sand, and 
with tears ; following baptism with chrism, sign of the 
cross, white robes, confirmation, holy kiss, honey and 
milk, and other mummeries too numerous to mention ; 
and that in all these ages disputes about all these 
modes and adjuncts have been rife. Is this ritual then 
(and the supper, about which as many conceits and as 



26 ABOLISHED RITES. 

many disputes have arisen) found woven into Paul's 
lofty catholic position, to secure the unity and purity 
of the Church?— to educate and train the Church to 
that higher spiritual life which she could not maintain, 
without going* back to these carnal elements? u 

" Where, we again ask, does the New Testament 
thus teach, or establish and define a law of sacra- 
ments? The evidence simply is, that Judaizers have 
interpolated them, and that the doctrine of baptism as 
a Christian ordinance, and of baptismal regeneration, 
was resorted to by the priesthood to gain power — to 
increase converts to their flocks and creeds — seizing 
even infants from their birth and before, to write their 
mark upon them, with most disgusting details of cere- 
monial adjuncts/' 

Surely this is a strong, bold master stroke against 
the observances of all fleshly ordinances, and coming, 
too, from a classical scholar, a college-bred Baptist 
Doctor of Divinity, armed with all the credentials of 
ordination and theological parchments. Under the 
head of " Water Baptism " and also under the head 
of "The Lord's Supper," other extracts from his 
work, " Ritualism Dethroned" are hereinafter inserted 
with due credit. 

Chillingworth says : "If this resting in outward 
performances was so odious to God under the law, a 
religion full of shadows and ceremonies, certainly it 
will be much more odious to do so under the gospel, 
a religion of much more simplicity, and exacting so 
much the greater sincerity of the heart, even because 
it disburdens the outward man of the performance of 
legal rites and observances." 

Swinnock says: "When corn runs into straw and 
chaff, those that feed on it may well be thin and lean. 
When religion runs into formalities and ceremonies, 
her followers can never be thriving spiritually. " 



ABOLISHED RITES. 2J 

Bishop J. H. Vincent says : " There are people who 
exalt forms and ceremonies in religious worship, for- 
getting- that parrots can talk, Aeolian harps emit sweet 
sounds, and sparrows chatter." 

Preston says : " There are men who cannot see the 
body for the clothing, the signification of the spirit for 
the letter, the sword for the sheath, the kernel for the 
shell. They cannot see Christ but in the outward 
bark and rind of ritual observances and ceremonies, in 
the shell of them ; and so they become unprofitable 
servants.*' 

The three fleshly rites to which many real Christians 
needlessly cling are, Feet-Washing, Water Baptism , 
and the Supper. The custom of feet-washing we con- 
sider first. 



FEET-WASHING. 



That the custom of feet-washing" was a very old one, 
and in vogue among God's ancient people as an act of 
necessity as well as kindness and service, seems plain 
from Scripture. Even if it had been part of the Jewish 
ceremonial law, it would not be binding upon Christ's 
Church now, so many centuries after the time of refor- 
mation, Heb. 9:10, but it is nowhere found to be even a 
rite of the ceremonial law. 

In 1 Sam. 25:41, before Christ 1060 years, we read 
the following : " And she arose, and bowed herself on 
her face to the earth, and said, Behold, let thine hand- 
maid be a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my 
lord." Again: "Let a little water, I pray you, be 
fetched, and wash your feet." — Gen. 18:4 — 1898 years 
before Christ. " They washed their feet, and did eat 
and drink ," — Judges 19:21 — 1406 years before Christ. 
" Come in, thou blessed of the Lord ; * * * and gave 
straw and provender for the camels, and water to wash 
his feet, and the men s feet that were with him." — Gen. 
24:31,32 — 1857 years before Christ. In those days, as 
now, the inhabitants of the Eastern countries wore 
sandals, which consist of soles fastened to the under 
part of the foot by means of cords or straps, and were 
little or no protection from dust. 

Those who make an ordinance of feet-washing refer 
to 1 Tim. 5:10, where we find this language : " If she 
have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints' 
feet." Nothing is said about its being an ordinance 
binding upon the Church, but the inference seems to 
be that it was to be done as an act of kindness or ser- 
vice to the Saints, similar to that of the others just 
above mentioned. 

1 (28) 



ABOLISHED RITES. 29 

We never read of Paul or the other apostles keeping up 
such an ordi?iance; and if it was to be observed, would 

THE REST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT BE SILENT CON- 
CERNING IT? 

John 13 asserts that Jesus washed the feet of His 
disciples. That He did this as a reproof for their desire 
to be great, and to give them a lesson in humility, and 
to teach them to take the low place, and serve one 
another, certainly seems very plain. Just before this 
they had been quarreling- among- themselves as to 
which should be greatest. Luke 22:24-27, says, 
''And there was also a strife amo?ig them, which of 
them should be accounted the greatest. And 
He said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise 
lordship over them ; and they that exercise authority 
upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not 
be so: but he that is greatest among- you, let him be 
as the young-er; and he that is chief, as he that doth 
serve. For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, 
or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but 
I am among: you as he that serveth." 

How easy of comprehension are the Saviour's 
words! By His act of washing- their feet, one of the 
most menial services that could be performed, He 
desired to show them that their proper attitude one 
toward the other was that of one who serves — w r ho 
takes the low place. The Lord here says nothing con- 
cerning feet-washi?ig as an ordina?ice to be kept up by 
the Church. 

Instituting- ordinances was not Christ's mission on 
earth, but the abolishing of them was part of His mis- 
sion. " Having abolished in His flesh the enmity, 
even the law of commandments contained in ordi- 
nances." — Eph. 2:15. 

John 13 says: "He riseth from supper, and laid 
aside His g-arments; and took a towel, and girded Him- 
self. After that He poureth water into a basin, and 
beg-an to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them 
with the towel wherewith He was girded. Then com- 
eth Hq tQ Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto Him, 



30 ABOLISHED RITES. 

Lord, dost Thou wash my feet? Jesus answered and 
said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but 
thou Shalt know hereafter. Peter saith unto 
Him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered 
him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me. 
Simon Peter saith unto Him, Lord, not my feet only, 
but also my hands and my head. Jesus saith to him, 
He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, 
but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all. 
For He knew who should betray Him; therefore said 
He, Ye are not all clean. So after He had washed 
their feet, and had taken His garments, and was set 
down again, He said unto them, Know ye wha£ I 
have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and 
ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and 
Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash 
one another's feet. For I have given you an example, 
that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, 
verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than 
his Lord; neither he that is sent greater than He that 
sent him, If ye know these things, happy are ye if 
ye do them." — John 13: 4-17. 

Carefully examine these scriptures, and see whether 
Christ is teaching a lesson in humility, giving an ex- 
ample in taking the lowly place, or whether He is in- 
stituting a rite, with instructions to call it the ordi- 
nance of Feet- Washing. Remember the words of 
Jesus: "it is the Spirit that guicke?ieth; the flesh 
profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, 
they are spirit, and they are life." — John 6:63. 

While washing the feet of His disciples literally, 
Jesus said unto them: " What I do thou knowest not 

now; BUT THOU SHALT KNOW HEREAFTER." If He 

only desired to teach them the mere act of literal feet- 
washing, such an expression was unnecessary, for they 
well knew that He was then literally washing their 
feet. But the import of Christ's act and words was 
much deeper than the mere washing of feet. ''But 
thou shalt "know hereafter" And then again: " When 
He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you 



ABOLISHED RITES. 3 1 

into all truth." — John 16:13. How significant this is. 

After washing" their feet, Jesus said: " Know ye what 
I have done to you? " If He did not mean to teach 
them something higher than the simple act just per- 
formed, would He ask such a question? They well 
knew that He had literally washed their feet, and if 
He meant no more than to teach them to literally 
wash feet, the question would be unnecessary, for they 
had just seen Him do it. Then He continued by tell- 
ing them that if He, their Lord, had washed their feet, 
they should do the same for one another. In other 
words, they should profit by the symbolic lesson He 
had just taught them, and be willing to accept the 
place of lowliness and of serving one another, rather 
than to quarrel among themselves as to which should 
be the greatest. 1 John 3:16 says: " We ought to lay 
down our lives for the brethren." Do men observe 
that as an ordinance, literally? The Master said, 
" Whosoever will come after me, let him deny him- 
self, and take up his cross, a?id follow me" — Mark 8:34. 
Would any Protestant think of observing this, liter- 
ally, by carrying a material cross of wood ? The Catho- 
lics do this, but they are not the most spiritual- 
minded people. 

To wash feet as Jesus really meant takes one who 
has the grace of God in his heart. It takes one who 
can ask pardon for an injury done; it takes one who is 
willing to stoop down; it takes one who, when he has 
wronged another, can confess the error and crave for- 
giveness. 

D. D. Babcock well says: " If when a brother comes 
to my house through rain and mud, weary, dirty, and 
footsore, I do not voluntarily clean his boots and 
clothing, wash his feet, and make him comfortable 
with my own hands — even if he be poor and despised, 
outcast and evil-spoken-of — any performance of the 
rite of feet-washing can be nothing more than a hypo- 
critical pretense to love and humility." 

" The letter kills. It is the Spirit that makes alive; 



32 ABOLISHED RITES. 

and by the Spirit only can the work of the Living 
One be performed. " 

"Romanism in Europe" says: ' The Levandee, or 
ceremony of washing- the disciples' feet, is still observed 
by the Pope once a year. It is a mere show or state 
ceremonial, and a great outrage on sacred things. No 
one is allowed to attend but the ttite of Catholic 
Europe, in court or evening" dress. At this splendid 
piece of pageantry, the pontiff uses a golden ewer and 
basin; everything* is well prepared and highly adorned, 
perfumes and nosegays of flowers are in profusion, 
and the whole forms a revolting contrast to a work of 
humiliation and charity/ ' 

With the Bible, which is " a lamp unto my feet, and 
a light unto my path," Psa. 119:105, as our guide, we 
shall now proceed to examine the much-disputed sub- 
ject of water baptism. 



WATER-BAPTISM. 



This we understand was a rite practiced under the 
Jewish system, and was typical of Christ's soul-cleans- 
ing" baptism, which is spiritual. Baptisms, or religious 
washings by water, was practiced long- before Christ 
came, a fact which the following- seems to prove : 
Levit. 8:5,6 says: " Moses said unto the congrega- 
tion, This is the thing which the Lord commanded to 
be done. And Moses brought Aaron and his sons, 
and washed them- with water/' 

"Take the Levites from among the children of 
Israel, and cleanse them. And thus shalt thou do 
unto them, to cleanse them : Sprinkle water of puri- 
fying upon them." — Numbers 8:6,7. Again, other in- 
stances of legal washings, or baptisms, will be found in 
Exod. 29:4530:20,21 540:12,30,32. 

The English words wash and baptize (verbs) are 
represented in the Greek by the word baptizo. So de- 
clare Stephen, Pasor, Scapula, Suicer, Heidericus, and 
many other noted scholars and lexicographers. The 
Greek word baptismos a (noun), according to Dew r eese, 
is represented by the English word baptism. The 
Jewish ceremonies of washings and water purifications 
were really water baptisms. In the Oxford Bible, 
under the head of Jewish Sects, Parties, Etc., we find 
the following: "They were uncircumcised, and were 
admitted into the Jewish Church by baptism." 

This has direct reference to certain proselytes con- 
verted to Judaism. In the same Bible, under the 
head of a Glossary of Antiquities, Customs, Etc., is the 
following: 

" Bathing was a luxury, or rather a necessity, in the 
hot climate of Egvpt, and also in Babvlonia; but 

(33) 



34 ABOLISHED RITES. 

among: the Hebrews it was practiced mainly as a re- 
ligious ceremonial, for removal of legal pollution, or 
as a symbol of repentance; from whence arose the ordi- 
nance of baptism, which was the prescribed form for 
the admission of women proselytes into covenant 
with God in the Jewish Church. Purification was not 
so much a cleansing" of the flesh from the dirt as a 
ceremonial washing from the typical pollution imparted 
to a sanctified people by contact with heathens or 
sinners, or their symbols. So every impure act virtu- 
ally excluded the participator from the presence of 
the all-pure God, and needed to be expiated by a fresh 
baptism" 

Sckaffs Bible Dictionary, under the head of Baptism, 
says : "An ordinance or religious rite, which was in 
use before Christ's ministry began. Christ Himself 
did not baptize, and the apostles received instead the 
baptism of fire and the Holy Ghost. John was a 
preacher of righteousness ; his baptism was signifi- 
cant of the inward cleansing which followed repentance 
and was introductory to the higher baptism instituted 
by Christ." 

Of course, this higher baptism the above author 
understands to be the spiritual one. " I indeed bap- 
tize you with water unto repentance : but He that 
cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am 
not worthy to bear : He shall baptize you with the 
Holy Ghost, and with fire."— Matt. 3:11. 

Clark's Commentary on Matt. 3:15 says: "Christ 
was circumcised, and observed all the ordinances of 
the law of Moses, not with a view to His own perfec- 
tion, but to fulfill the dispensation committed to Him." 

Again the same Commentator says : " Our Lord 
represented the high priest who was initiated into his 
office by washing, hence, He was baptized to fulfill the 
law r " 



ABOLISHED RITES. 35 

The Talmud says : " Israel does not enter into cov- 
enant, but by these three things, circumcision, baptism, 
and a peace-offering:, and all proselytes in like man- 
ner. The unborn child is baptized with the baptism 
of the (pregnant) mother/' 

"Wood on Baptism" says: "The Rabbis unani- 
mously assert that the baptism of proselytes has been 
practiced by the Jews in all ages, from Moses down 
to the time they wrote." 

Moses Maimonides, a Jewish Rabbi and writer of 
the 12th Century, says : " In all ages when a Gentile is 
willing to enter into covenant with Israel, and take 
upon himself the yoke of the law, he must be circum- 
cised and baptized, and bring a sacrifice. He is no 
proselyte unless he be circumcised and baptized. If 
he be not baptized he remains a Gentile." 

Prideaux says : " When any were proselyted to the 
Jewish religion, they were initiated to it by baptism, 
sacrifice, and circumcision." 

Dr. Wall, the learned high-churchman, says : It is 
evident that the custom of the Jews before our Saviour's 
time {and os they affirm from the beginning of their 
laze) was to baptize, as well as circumcise, any prose- 
lytes that came over to them from the nations. They 
reckoned all mankind, besides themselves, to be in an 
unclean state, and not capable of being entered into 
the covenant of Israelites without a washing or bap- 
tism, to denote their purification from their unclean- 
ness. ' And this was the baptizing of them unto 
Moses/ " 

Stuart on "Baptism" says: "In the Mishna, 
written by Rabbi Judah, A. D. 220, the author says: 
' As to a proselyte, who becomes a proselyte on the 
evening of the Passover, the followers of Shammai 
say, ' Let him be baptized, and let him eat the Passover 
in the evening.' " 



36 ABOLISHED RITES. 

Dr. K. J. Stewart, a Protestant Episcopal minister 
of Philadelphia, said : " Has any one authority to re- 
quire water-baptism of any person outside the Jewish 
Church and its legal representatives, save only as a 
mere ticket of admission to some human society? If 
one claims that he has any authority to require any 
one to be baptized, let him give us a text ; not a text 
authorizing- men to baptize persons desirous of enter- 
ing a branch of the Jewish Church ; but a text requir- 
ing a pious ' Friend/ or a Gentile to be baptized, as 
important to salvation." 

" One of the most intelligent societies of Christians 
utterly repudiates water-baptism as required in Scrip- 
ture. An Episcopal clergyman has offered a hundred 
dollars for a text to that import. St. Paul says we 
are not saved by such ordinances, but only by the 
blood of Jesus Christ. St. Peter says that the out- 
ward washing in baptism does not save us ; and finally 
Abraham received the church covenant, being uncir- 
cumcised, that he might be the father of unbaptized 
people as well as of Jews ; see also the case of the first 
Roman convert, Cornelius, who received the New 
Testament before baptism/' 

" These facts do not imply that baptism is not as 
obligatory as other matters of the Jewish ritual ; but 
he who claims authority to impose water-baptism out- 
side the jurisdiction of the Jewish Church and its 
branches, has no foundation for such claim in Scrip- 
ture/' 

Wilson says : "The Jews baptized the females and 
children of proselytes, as well as circumcised the 
males, and all in strict accordance with the principles 
of membership in the Jewish Church/' 

Water baptism is first mentioned in the Gospels 
with John the Baptist — the forerunner of Jesus. John, 
under the law, said : " I indeed baptize you with water; 
but One mightier than I cometh, the latchet of 
whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose : He shall 



ABOLISHED RITES. $7 

baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire." 
— Luke 3:16. "He must increase, but I must de- 
crease." — John 3:30. 

Can we mistake this? Here it is plainly stated that 
Johns baptism is water, but Christ's is of the Spirit, 
and that John s will decrease, but Christ's will in- 
crease. If we have the reality, the Spirit, why go 
back to the water symbol? "And, being- assembled 
together with them, commanded them that they should 
not depart from Jerusalem, but w r ait for the promise 
of the Father, which, saith He, ye have heard of me. 
For John truly baptized with water; but YE shall 
be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days 
hence. " — Acts 1:4,5. 

All intelligent Christians agree that there is a 
spiritual baptism, but some claim that water baptism 
is also necessary. But we are glad that God's Word 
settles the question beyond a doubt, for it plainly says: 
" One Lord, one faith, one baptism." — Eph. 4:5. 
"For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one 
body." — i Cor. 12:13. We dare not assume to con- 
tradict this, by adding" water to the enumeration, if 
lig-ht and truth concerning" the abolishment of fleshly 
ceremonies have illuminated our soul. " Jesus Him- 
self baptized not, but His disciples." — John 4:2. 
Some Christians affirm that as Christ was baptized 
with water, we must likewise observe the rite. But 
nowhere does He command us in this dispensation of 
the Spirit, to be baptized in water, or to observe 
any other carnal ordinance. He was a Jew, born 
under the law, and He too fulfilled it, even to 
circumcision and water baptism. 

"And when eight days were accomplished for the 
circumcisi?ig of the child, His name was called Jesus. 
* * * And when the days of her purification according 
to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought 
Him to Jerusalem. * * * The parents brought in the 
child Jesus, to do for Him after the custom of the law. 
They had performed all things according to the 
law. * * * Now His parents went to Jerusalem every 



38 ABOLISHED RITES. 

year at the least of the Passover" — Luke 2:21,22,27, 

39,41. 

John did not want to baptize Him, but Jesus said: 
" Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to 
fulfill all righteousness.' ■ — Matt. 3:15. To what 
righteousness does He here refer? Manifestly to the 
righteousness of the baptismal rite under the Mosaic 
dispensation. But "when the fullness of the time 
was come" (Gal. 4:4) Jesus, "made under the law," 

(Gal. 4:4) FOREVER BANISHED LEGAL CEREMONIES by 

His work on the cross, and opened up a new and 
living way. Therefore there can no longer be any 
merit or righteousness in water baptism to a soul that 
has the substance to which the water pointed, namely, 
the spiritual. 

The Jews did not want to receive Christ, and John 
tells why he baptized with water. It was that- the 
Jews might recognize the Messiah, because they 
looked on water baptism as a ceremonial of their law. 
Now if water baptism was not an ordinance of the 
Jewish economy, and so recognized by the Israelites, 
how could the observance of it by Jesus prove to the 
Jews that He was the looked-for Redeemer? " Now 
I say that Jesus Christ was a minister of the circum- 
cision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises 
made u?ito the fathers." — Rom. 15:8. 

John says : " I knew him not: but that He should be 
made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptiz- 
ing with water." — John 1:31. So it is plain beyond 
dispute, that Christ observed the rite of water baptism 
because it belonged to the rituals of Israel, because He 
was an Israelite, and because it behooved Him to be 

thus " MADE MANIFEST TO ISRAEL." 

Those who talk so much about "following Christ 
down into the water," should also, in order to be con- 
sistent, follow Him in circumcision and in all the 
other Jewish observances, if there be any merit now in 
these outward things. Let it be remembered that 
Jesus, as a Jew, observed the ceremonial law faith- 
fully, and that very law, too, which, as the Messiah, 



ABOLISHED RITES. 39 

He forever blotted out when the time came. The 
literal observance of the fleshly rites which Jesus, as a 
Jew under the law did, is not what He expects of us 
now. But He does want obedience to His law ot 
love. There is no merit now in this dispensation of 
the Spirit, in going* into Jordan, or carrying a literal 
cross like the Catholics, but a far better proof of being 
a follower of Christ in spirit, would be to manifest His 
spirit, and to imitate His deeds of kindness, love, 
sympathy and humility. A plunge or a dip into water 
may be used to make a professed follower of Jesus, but 
it requires the baptism of the Spirit of the living God 
to make a real follower. If we have the Spirit 
baptism we don't need a symbolic water baptism. If 
we can't prove by our life and work that we are Chris- 
tians, we certainly cannot prove it by a water baptism. 
If we have no better sign or evidence of an inward 
cleansing than water baptism can impart, then we may 
well doubt our salvation. If we have the Spirit's seal 
and witness in our heart, then how weak, carnal, and 
impotent is the application of literal water to our 
fleshly body! 

It is claimed by some that the Apostles baptized 
with water. It is certainly true, they did, but was it 
not John's legal baptism, and prior to " the ti??ie of 
reformation ?'' We don't read of any being baptized 
in water after the change of dispensations recorded in 
Heb. 9:10, which Scripture reads thus : " Which stood 
only iii meats and drinks, and divers washings (Greek 
and German baptisms), and carnal ordinances, imposed 
on them until the time of reformation" Quoting Heb. 
9:10, The Religious Encyclopedia says: "There were 
divers washings, baptisms, enjoined under the former 
dispensation." 

Our water brethren, like Peter in Acts 10:47, are 
ready to cry out: "Can any man forbid water, that 
these should not be baptized?'' but they are not all 
as humble and yielding as Peter was when he dis- 
covered his mistake, as he tells us in the next chapter, 
verses 16,17, where he says : "Then remembered I the 



40 ABOLISHED RITES. 

word of the Lord, how that He said, John indeed bap- 
tized with water ; but ye shall be baptized with the 
Holy Ghost. * * * What was I, that I could with- 
stand God?" If he could not resist the truth, how can 
any other person after light beams? 

Paul, in i Cor. 1:14,17, says: "/ thank God that 
I baptized none of you, but Crispus and Gaius. For 
Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gos- 
pel. " It is common for some ministers to be rather 
elated by the number of people they have sprinkled or 
dipped, but compare this with Paul's view. 

The friends of water baptism may strive to offset 
this by saying" that Paul admits that he baptized 
" Crispus and Gaius. " We reply, yes, he does admit 
that he baptized those two. But right there he also 
says: " I thank God that I baptized none of you, but 
Crispus and Gaius. For Christ sent me not to baptize, 

BUT TO PREACH THE GOSPEL." — I Cor. 1:14,17. Again 

it may be insisted : " Well, but he baptized those at all 
events/ ' We reply, yes, he did, but the customs of the 
law were still practiced. Paul also observed the 
" feast in Jerusalem," Acts 18:21 ; and he sailed away 
from Philippi " after the days of unleavened bread" 
Acts 20:6; he shaved his head, " for he had a vow," 
Acts 18:18; and Timothy he "took and circumcised 
because of the Jews," Acts 16:3. This Paul did 
while the customs of the law were still observed. But 
let it be noted that these observances recorded in Acts 
were some years before " the time of reformation," 
recorded in Heb. 9:10, and the baptizing of which he 
speaks in 1 Cor. 1 , was five years before the time of 
reformation." So we see no point which ordinance 
advocates can make here for water baptism. 

" Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and 
of the Holy Ghost : Teaching them to observe all things 
whatsoever I have commanded you : and, lo, I am 
with you alway, even unto the end of the world," or, 
as some interpret it, state or dispensation. — Matt. 
28:19,20. 



ABOLISHED RITES. 41 

" And He said unto them, Go ye into all the world, 
and preach the gospel to every creature. He that 
believeth and is baptized shall be saved ; but he that 
believeth not shall be damned. " — Mark 16:15,16. 

The above texts are often quoted in defence of water 
baptism, but water is not mentioned \ therefore we 

HAVE NO AUTHORITY FOR INSERTING IT. In those 

texts we have the commission of Christ to His dis- 
ciples, and as John declares that Christ's baptism will 
be of the Spirit, we have no authority for saying- that 
Jesus sent out His disciples to baptize with water. 
And as they were to observe whatsoever He had com- 
manded them, and as there are no Scriptures to prove 
that He commanded them to baptize with water, we 
cannot affirm that the baptism of this commission was 
water. 

If water baptism was the baptism of the commission 
surely Paul should have zealously administered it, but 
note what is above quoted from him. Indeed, there is 
nothing in these texts of the commission which implies 
or demands water. John's baptism was water, but 
Christ's was of the Spirit, and as the baptism of the 
commission was Christ's baptism, how could it be 
other than the Spirit baptism? "For by one Spirit 

ARE WE ALL BAPTIZED INTO ONE BODY." 1 Cor. 12:13, 

' One Lord, one faith, one baptism." — Eph. 4:5. 

Surely no one will deny that the baptism of the 
commission was Christ's baptism, neither will any 
deny that Christ's baptism was of the Spirit. Now, 
how can water advocates crowd water into the bap- 
tism of the commission, when water is not mentioned? 
Again, upon the testimony of John the Baptist, how 
can there be any water in the baptism of the commis- 
sion, for he most emphatically says: " I indeed baptize 
you with water ; but One mightier than I cometh, 
the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: 
He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and 
with fire. — Luke 3:16. He must increase, but I must 
decrease." — John 3:30. 

Regarding the baptism of the Spirit, we have these 



42 ABOLISHED RITES. 

promises in the Old Testament: " And it shall come to 
pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all 
flesh," Joel 2:28; and " I will pour my Spirit upon 
thy seed, and my blessing- upon thine offspring-," Isa. 
44:3. Concerning the gift of the Holy Ghost, Peter 
said: " The promise is unto you, and to your children, 
and to all that are .afar off, even as many as the Lord 
our God shall call." — Acts 2:39. 

Now how can water baptism be forced into the 
commission, when even the words of the commission 
neither mention nor intimate water? The learned Dr. 
Dale, in his Judaic Baptism, declares that the word 
baptizo is frequently used in classic and inspired writ- 
ings where no physical element is meant, and that the 
presence of the physical element should be proven, and 
not taken for granted. 

Concerning the commission, (Matt. 28:19) Dr. J. 
W.Dale says: "Observe that the command is to 
make disciples of all nations, but discipleship under 
any teacher is represented as baptism into that teacher. 
Therefore, Paul asks of those who would be his dis- 
ciples, 'Were ye baptized in the name of Paul?' 
(1 Cor. 1:13). The Jews said, ' Thou art His disciple; 
but we are Moses' disciples (John 9:28), and they re- 
fused to be baptized into Christ while they and their 
fathers were baptized into Moses." 

"There is, then, no rational ground to doubt, 
1. That the nations were to be made disciples of 
Christ. 2. That the discipleship involved baptism 
into Christ. 3. That, inasmuch as discipleship of 
Christ requires repentance and faith, this baptism into 
Christ is such baptism as is effected by the Holy 
Ghost. 4. That if any ritual baptism be associated 
with the real baptism ; then the rite can only symbolize 
the reality. There is an absolute necessity for this bap- 
tism of the nations into Christ as antecedent and 
preparative, and also causative of the ulterior baptism 
into the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." 

"The Lord Jesus Christ teaches in the most abso- 



ABOLISHED RITES. 43 

lute and universal terms, ' No man cometh unto the 
Father, but by me.' (John 14:6.) It is utterly subver- 
sive of all the teachings of Scripture to hold that a sin- 
ner can be baptized into the Father, Son and Holy 
Ghost without first being- baptized into a crucified Re- 
deemer. The Lord Jesus says, ' I am the way, no man 
cometh unto the Father, but by me/ (John 14:6:) 
Where remission of sins is we have ' boldness to enter 
into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and 
living way. Having our hearts sprinkled from an evil 
conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.' 
(Heb. 10:19,20,22.) Unto God in His holiness the 
sinner in his pollution cannot come. Unto God, in 
Christ, the ' Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin 
of the world' (John 1:29), the sinner, in all his guilt, 
may come, must come ! When the sinner has come to 
Christ — has been ' baptized into Him ' — ' baptized into 
the remission of sins ' — has been invested with His 
1 fulfillment of all righteousness,' then, and only then, 
is he prepared to be led by the Mediator between God 
and man, along the * new and living way,' by which 
he can be received by God in His holiness, and be 
qualified for the ultimate baptism which is forever, 
even forever and ever, ' i?ito the name of the Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost' " 

"Thus this wondrous baptism, which is the con- 
summation of the work of redemption, is indissolubly 
joined with the baptism of the cross, and could have no 
existence without it." 

W. J. Allinson of Friends Review says, concerning 
the baptism of the commission, Matt. 28:19: " It is 
popularly taken for granted that this word ' baptizing ' 
is to be received in a ceremonial sense. [Our Lord 
taught of moral, not physical things.] Thus He calls 
Himself ' the vine,' ' the door,' ' the bread of life,' etc. 
When His words were too literally taken He shows 
His sense of the dullness of His hearers : ' How is it 
that ye do not understand?' (Matt. 16:11.) In the 
vague, indefinite literal sense of the word baptize, 



44 ABOLISHED RITES. 

it may mean wash, purge, sprinkle, pour, immerse, 
stain, ornament, apply, overwhelm, etc., but in a theo- 
logic sense, it were rank heresy to deny the proposi- 
tion that there is but ' one baptism/ What that is, 
and what it is not, we find clearly established ; and in 
the text under review, there is no naming of water. 
It were begging- the question to place it there (if it 
were there I should claim for it its theologic sense); 
no command to use any outward rite or type; but the 
promise of the true Baptizer immediately follows: 
' Lo, I am with you alway,' etc." (Matt. 28:20). 

" Then they are told to ' teach, baptizing ' (not teach, 
and baptize as two distinct things), which must mean, 
preaching only under the Divine influence, the Holy 
Spirit, the one baptism shall accompany the word 
preached, carrying it to the souls of the hearers with 
convicting power, ' purifying their hearts by faith.' 
Teaching under holy inspiration was to be the Spirit ' s 
act through an instrument, and the ' one baptism,' the 
Spirit's act direct, was to accompany, and unto God 
should be all the glory. Peter, an apostle, was, by 
simultaneous revelation to himself and to Cornelius, 
required to go to a company of Gentiles and teach 
baptizingly. The words of his teaching were given to 
him by the Spirit, and the baptism was given to them 
by the Spirit. To confirm the fact so that there could 
be no gainsaying, it was visibly conferred, Peter told 
the Church the astonishing story, 'As I began to 
speak, the Holy Ghost fell on them, as on us at the 
beginning. Then remembered I the word of the Lord, 
how that He said, John indeed baptized with water ; 
but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost.'' 
(Acts 11:15,16.) 

There is positively no scripture record that Christ 
ever commissioned His apostles or disciples to baptize 
with water. But John the Baptist, under the Jewish 
economy, did baptize with water, in accord with the 
dispensation of rites and ceremonies. John declares 
that his baptism is of water, so separating it from 



ABOLISHED RITES. 45 

Christ's baptism of the Spirit. Both John and Jesus 
testify to two opposite and distinct baptisms, one with 
water and one of the Spirit. It is plainly intimated 
that they shall never be united, and that the one of 
water shall pass away, and the ONE OF THE 
SPIRIT REMAIN, "By 07ie Spirit are we all 
baptized into oxe body." (i Cor. 12:13.) Water 
baptism does not baptize into one body, but it is pro- 
ductive of a host of jarring-, jangling- sects, each one 
of which clamors for its particular mode, while ?iot 
one mode is given in the Bible. 

Ag-ain we quote one of the texts that embodies the 
commission: " Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, 
baptizing* them in the name (water not mentioned) 
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' ' 
— Matt. 28:19. This is what water advocates claim 
as a strong* plea for water baptism, but the text does 
not mention water. On the expression " i?i the name " 
seems to be where they force in the water, but the text 
does not say into water, but it does say " i?ito the ?ia?ne 
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost" Is the 
name of the Lord here to be taken as a mere expres- 
sion or sound of words? Does in the name not stand 
for virtue, power, and heavenly influence, which is alone 
characteristic of the Great Godhead? Does not Jesus 
bring- out this truth: "I have manifested Thy na?ne 
unto the men which Thou g-avest me out of the world. 
Holy Father, keep throiigh Thine own name those 
whom Thou hast given me. I kept them in Thy 
name." — John 17:6,11,12. Additional New Testament 
testimony to the virtue and power of the name is as 
follows : " Even the devils are subject unto us through 
thy name," Luke 10:17; "That believing- ye might 
have life through His name," John 20:31; "And His 
name through faith in His ?iame hath made this man 
strong," Acts 3:16 ; " Be it known unto you all, and 
to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus 
Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God 
raised from the dead, even by Him doth this man 
stand here before you whole" Acts 4:10; " Neither is 



46 ABOLISHED RITES. 

there salvation in any other : for there is none other 
name under Heaven given among men, whereby we 
must be saved," Acts 4:12; "As many as received 
Him, to them gave He power to become the Sons of God, 
even to them that believe ON HIS NAME."— 
John 1:12. The same truth is brought out in the Old 
Testament. " The name of the Lord is A strong 
tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe." — 
Prov. 18:10. "They that know Thy name will put 
their trust in Thee." — Psa. 9:10. " Thy name is as 
ointment poured forth." — Cant. 1:3. " Save me, O God, 
BY THY NAME, and judge me by Thy strength." 
—Psa. 54:1. 

Joseph Phipps, while dwelling- upon Matt. 28:19, 
the text of the commission in his admirable work en- 
titled: True Christian Baptism and Communion ," 
says: ''Into the internal virtue and influence of the 
sacred and all-sufficient name or Spirit, are all the 
truly regenerate measurably baptized ; for ' If any man 
have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." — 
Rom. 8:9. 

Robert Barclay, in commenting: on this same text, 
Matt. 28:19, says : u Now the name of the Lord is 
often taken in Scripture for something- else than a bare 
sound of words, or literal expression, even for His 
virtue and power as may appear from Psa. 54:1; Cant. 
1:3; Prov. 18:10; and in many more. Now, that the 
apostles were by their ministry to baptize the nations 
into His name, virtue, and power, and that they did 
so is evident by the testimony of Paul where he saith: 
* For, as many of you as have been baptized into 
Christ have put on Christ ' (Gal. 3:27). This must 
have been a baptizing into the name, i. e. power and 
virtue, and not a .mere formal expression of words 
adjoined with water baptism ; because as hath been 
above observed, it doth not follow as a natural or 
necessary consequence of it," 



ABOLISHED RITES. 47 

Dr. J. W. Dale in his work on baptism says : " Dis- 
cipleship under any teacher is represented as baptism 
into that teacher. The discipleship involved baptism 
into Christ. Inasmuch as discipleship of Christ re- 
quires repentance and faith, this baptism into Christ is 
such baptism as is effected by the Holy Ghost. Thus 
this wondrous baptism which is the consummation of 
the work of redemption, is indissolubly joined with 
the baptism of the commission, and could have no 
existence without it." 

In view of all this, and the wide range and diversi- 
fied use and meaning of the word baptize, is it not 
reasonable to infer that the command in the commis- 
sion was to go out and teach all nations, initiating 
them into a real knowledge of the true God, an infus- 
ing - of them " into the name" (power, influence, spirit) 
of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Certain at 
least, it is that water is not ??ientio?ied i?i the text. Cer- 
tain it is that Christ's baptism is of the spirit. 
Certain it is that there is now ONLY " ONE BAP- 
TISM,' 7 (Eph. 4:5). Certain it is that " by o?ie Spirit 
are we all baptized into one body." (i Cor. 
12:13). 

Even if the baptism of the commission as given in 
Matt. 28:19, Mark 16:15,16, was plainly declared to 
be a water baptism (which it of course is not) it woufd 
only have been binding- during- the dispensation of 
rites and ceremonies, and would have ceased after 
" the time of reformation "(Heb. 9:10), thirty-one years 
after, and could have no force now, and especially not 
with Gentile believers who were never bound to the 
legal observances of Judaism. 

Many Christians are like Apollos; he was a Jew, 
keeping- the law, and in Acts 18:25,26 we read : "This 
man was instructed in the way of the Lord ; and being 
fervent in the spirit, he spake and taught diligently 
the things of the Lord, knowing only the baptism of 
John. And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue: 
whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they took 



48 ABOLISHED RITES. 

him unto them, and expounded unto him THE WAY 
OF GOD MORE PERFECTLY." So, because 
" knowing only the baptism of John" he needed wisdom 
beyond that. Just so, to-day, there are many good, 
well-meaning 1 people in the same condition. 

Perhaps with Apollos and many others, being- 
Israelites, and having an attachment for the rites of 
the old covenant, it was difficult all at once to over- 
come a long-established custom and Jewish prejudice. 
And if we practice water baptism to-day because they 
did, we have progressed no further into the things of 
the Spirit in that particular. 

Let us heed the declaration of John : " 1 indeed bap- 
tize you with water; but One mightier than I cometh, 
the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: 
He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire. 
— Luke 3:16. "He must increase, but I must de- 
crease. 1 ' — John 3:30. In the minds of some there is 
a doubt as to whether or not God intrusts His servants 
with any part or place in the bringing-about of the 
Spirit baptism, but do not the following Scriptures 
intimate that He does? 

" Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the 
epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with 
ink, but with the Spirit of the living God ; not in 
tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart. Who 
also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; 
not of the letter, (the law) but of the Spirit : for the 
letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." — 2 Cor.3:3,6. 

" Preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost 
sent down from Heaven." — 1 Peter 1:12. 

" My speech and my preaching" was not with enti- 
cing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of 
the Spirit and of power : That your faith should not 
stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God'' 
— 1 Cor. 2:4,5. " F° r our gospel came not unto you 
in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, 
and in much assurance." — 1 Thess. 1:5. 

The Spirit baptism is something that draws the 
children of God together and nourishes their souls in 



ABOLISHED RITES. - 49 

sweet, mutual fellowship. It ignites in the soul of 
kindred saints. " For by one Spirit are we all bap- 
tized into one body * * * and have been all made 
to drink into one Spirit" — I Cor. 12:13. 

There is certainly, at times, at least, a Spirit bapti- 
zing- or influencing power or condition that accom- 
panies the faithful preaching and teaching of the gos- 
pel. God surely condescends to use men in the 
imparting of "spiritual gifts" (Rom. 1:11); in the 
begetting of children " through the gospel" (i Cor. 4: 
15), and in the turning of sinners ' from darkness to 
light, and from the power of Satan unto God" (Acts 
26:18). 

"One Lord, one faith, one baptism." — Eph. 4:5. 
" For by one Spirit are we all baptized in one body" — 
1 Cor. 12:13. The word baptize or baptism does not 
necessarily always refer to the application of water. 
We may be baptized, influenced, or enveloped, in, or 
with, joy, grief, anger, or love, all of which are abso- 
lutely apart from water. The mother of Zebedee's 
children asked a great thing of Christ, but He said : 
" Are ye able to be baptized with the baptism that I 
am baptized with ? " — Matt. 20:22. Again He de- 
clared, " I have a baptism to be baptized with ; and 
how am I straitened till it be accomplished !"— Luke 
12:50. In both instances- He here refers to a baptism 
of mental and bodily suffering. 

. Water is not to be understood always when the 
word baptism is mentioned. Paul, in Eph. 4:5, says 
there is only "one baptism ;" in 1 Cor. 12:13 he says 
that by one Spirit are we all baptized i?ito one body" 
Now, if it is true as some would teach, that there are 
still two baptisms, one of water and the other of the 
Spirit, then Paul made a mistake. And if it is true, as 
some state, that water baptism is the door into the 
Church or the sign of discipleship, then Paul made 
another mistake. 

To be consistent these people who insist on literal 
water whenever baptism is mentioned, might also in- 
sist on literal fire when fire is mentioned in connection 



50 ABOLISHED RITES. 

with baptism. It is a poor rule that won't work both 
ways. 

The learned Dr. J. W. Dale, in his work on baptism 
says : " The master-key to the interpretation of baptizo 
is condition, — condition characterized by complete- 
ness, with or without physical envelopment. What- 
ever IS CAPABLE OF THOROUGHLY CHANGING THE 
CHARACTER, STATE OR CONDITION OF ANY OBJECT IS 
CAPABLE OF BAPTIZING THAT OBJECT ; AND BY SUCH 
CHANGE OF CHARACTER, STATE OR CONDITION DOES IN 
FACT BAPTIZE IT." 

There is no form of act inherent in baptizo. The 
conception that any word expressive of condition can 
be self-limited as to the form of the act or agency 
effecting" such condition, is an error." 

"Baptism is a myriad-sided word, adjusting itself 
to the most diverse cases. It has no form of act of its 
own ; it asks for none ; it accepts indifferently, of any, 
of all, competent to meet its demand — change of condi- 
tion." 

' Neither Paul, nor any other minister of Christ, was 
ever sent to preach a ritual baptism. The Christian 
commission is to preach Christ and His baptism (who 
never baptized with water), and the man of whose 
ministry it can be justly said, his preaching - is the 
preaching of a ritual ordinance, cannot be one of 
those whom Christ has sent to preach the gospel." 

Only Israelites were under the law. Gentiles were 
exempt from observing the ceremonials of Judaism. 
A careful perusal of the 15th chapter of Acts makes 
this clear. It was concerning Cornelius that Peter 
received the lesson in a trance in which God taught 
him that what He had cleansed, man should not call 
common or unclean. See Acts 10:10-33. It was also 
concerning him that Peter said : "Of a truth I per- 
ceive that God is no respecter of persons : But in every 
nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteous- 
ness, is accepted with Him." — Acts 10:34,35. 



ABOLISHED RITES. 5 I 

Again ordinance Christians quote the exclamations 
of Ananias to Paul, "And now why tarriest thou? 
arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, call- 
ing- on the name of the Lord," Acts 22:16; but it is 
hardly necessary to say that Paul, before Christ 
stopped him on the way to Damascus, was a Jew of ' 
the strictest kind, and his conversion and Ananias' ex- 
hortation occurred A. D. 35, twenty-nine years before 
" the time of reformation." Moreover Paul, while re- 
lating - his conversion and Ananias's exhortation to him 
to be baptized, speaks of Ananias as " a devout man 
according to the law, having - a good report of all the 
Jews." See Acts 22:6-16. Still they will persist in 
producing- 1 Peter 3:21 : "The like figure whereunto 
even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting 
away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good 
conscience toward God), by the resurrectio?i of Jesus 
Christ." Does that invest water baptism with saving 
merit? The text says it is " not the putting away of 
the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good con- 
science toward God." Is the baptism, then, of water, 
or that one which produces a good conscience? Water 
cannot cleanse the sinner's heart or conscience — the 
Spirit can. 

The text says it is "not the putting away of the 
filth of the flesh," the ceremonial washing or baptism 
of the law would do that, but the text says it is "the 
answer of a good conscience toward God, by the resur- 
rection of Jesus Christ." Now, water cannot give 
" the answer of a good conscience toward God, by the 
resurrection of Jesus Christ," but the Spirit baptism 
can and does ! Now, which is the baptism referred to 
in the text, water, or Spirit ? " 

"The like figure." That the Apostle here refers 
to water baptism as a figure of the Spirit baptism 
seems evident. If he means to use water baptism both 
as being the figure and the thing figured, then he sim- 
ply uses one figure to represent another. How could 
this be, since types are used to point to substances ? 
Would it not be a glaring misuse of figurative laiv- 



52 ABOLISHED RITES. 

guage to endeavor to make one figure, sign, or type 
represent another figure, sign or type ? Would it not 
be absurd to use one figure as the anti-type of an- 
other ? Types were used to point to substances or 
realities. Where, in Scripture, was one figure used to 
represent another figure ? 

Dr. Mitchell, of Derby, in a sermon on the purpose 
of the Gospel, says : " Christianity does not attempt 
to substitute one rite in the room of others which have 
been abrogated, but to bring men back to a strict 
regard to natural and moral duties." 

Noah and his family were not saved by the deluging 
waters of the flood which drowned the wicked race, 
but they were saved by being sheltered within the Ark. 
Are we now saved by water baptism, or by being 
sheltered in Christ, the Ark of Safety ? 

Who will say that water baptism would have made 
the thief on the cross more meet for Paradise than he 
was when Jesus declared that he should be there with 
Him ? Who will say that Simon the Sorcerer, who 
was presumably baptized with legal water baptism 
was any the better for it since it was afterward said to 
him : " I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitter- 
ness, and in the bond of iniquity." — Acts 8:23. 

Among all the manifold and conflicting modes of 
administering water baptism, so unkindly, often, con- 
tended for by Christians, not one form is mentioned in 
the New Testament. Not a word is said about dip- 
ping, sprinkling, or pouring, hence no person can 
adopt either mode and prove it by the New Testament 
to be the mode. If Jesus had intended us to observe 
this Jewish symbol of purification in the spiritual dis- 
pensation, would He not have told us so, and have 
prescribed the exact mode for its administration ? 

The observers of the rite of water baptism often 
refer to the fact that some of the early Christians ob- 
served the ceremony, and claim this to be a strong 
point in its favor. True some of the Second and 



ABOLISHED RITES. 53 

Third Century Christians did adopt the legal ceremony 
of water baptism, and the church hastily drifted into 
the conditions that ushered in Popery and Catholicism, 
as is elsewhere more fully shown in this work. But 
let us read the testimony of some of these early Chris- 
tians regarding' water baptism as recorded in history, 
and we shall see how far from being spiritual-minded 
in the matter some of them were. 

Chrysostom (Greek, died A. D. 407) said: ''Al- 
though a man should be foul with every vice, the 
blackest that can be named, yet should he fall into the 
baptismal pool, he ascends from the divine waters 
purer than the beams of noon ; he is made just in a 
moment. They who approach the baptismal font, al- 
though fornicators, etc., are not only made clean, but 
holy also, and just. As a spark thrown into the ocean 
is instantly extinguished, so is sin (be it what it may) 
extinguished when the man is thrown into the laver of 
regeneration. " 

Tertullian (Latin, died between A. D. 220-240) 
said: "We are three times plunged into the water, 
and when we are taken up, we taste a mixture of milk 
and honey. When we go to meat, when we lie down, 
sit down, and whatever business we have, we make on 
our foreheads the sign of the cross. If you search the 
Scriptures for any command for these and such like 
usages, you shall find none. TRADITION will be 
urged to you as the ground of them — custom as the 
confirmation of them — and our religion teaches us to 
observe them. ,, 

These ancient Christians are often now referred to 
as the "early Christian fathers," but such crude and 
carnal ideas of baptism deserve to be rejected, whether 
advocated by either the ancient or modern teachers. 
Tertullian, above quoted, seems to have had a contro- 
versy with some who rejected water baptism, for Rob- 
inson, the Baptist historian, declares that Tertullian. 



54 ABOLISHED RITES. 

said to some, the following : " You act naturally, for 
you are serpents, and serpents love deserts and avoid 
water ; but we, like fishes, are born in the water, and 
are safe by continuing in it." 

Surely, this " ancient father" would have made a very 
zealous modern " hard-shell " Baptist or a very good 
Campbellite, for the latter two make more of an idol 
out of water baptism, perhaps, than any other of the 
water sects. 

Tertullian may have supposed that he was making a 
strong point out of his snake figure, but he seems to 
have not known that some species of snakes are in 
their element when in the water, and out of it when on 
dry land. 

Cyril {Fourth Century) says : "If anyone desires to 
know why grace is given by means of water and not 
by means of any of the other elements, searching the 
Divine Scriptures he will find out. For water is 
some great thing. Water was the beginning of the 
world, and the Jordan was the beginning of the 
Gospels. " 

There are water advocates to-day just as much in 
the dark as this ancient Saint, and like him, fancy that 
" Water is some great thing!' 

In Acts 8:27-39 is given the account of Philip and 
the Eunuch. This man was returning from Jerusalem, 
where he had been to worship, and was sitting in his 
chariot reading the Old Testament Scriptures. He 
asked Philip to sit with him, and Philip " preached 
unto him Jesus," not water, ver. 35. But in ver. 36. 
the Eunuch (not Philip) said: "See, here is water; 
what doth hinder me to be baptized ? " Just as with 
others, subject to the rites of Moses, he was occupied 
with the Jewish rite of water baptism. But it may be 
argued that Philip readily granted the Eunuch's re- 
quest for water baptism. True, he did, but it is also 
true that Paul just as readily circumcised Timothy 



ABOLISHED RITES. 55 

" BECAUSE OF THE JEWS WHICH WERE IN THOSE QUAR- 
TERS." — Acts 16:3. This baptism of the Eunuch by 
water occurred A. D, 34, thirty years before " the time 
of reformation." 

Some assert that water baptism is plainly taught in 
Rom. 6:3,4. It says : " Know ye not, that so many of 
us as were baptized into Jesus Christ (not water) were 
baptized into His death f Therefore we are buried 
with Him by baptism (it does not say by water) into 
death : that like as Christ was raised up from the dead 
by the glory of the Father, even so we also should 
walk in newness of life." 

If we must see water in the baptism into Christ, we 
may just as consistently see wood in the cross which 
all Christians must more or less bear. Moreover, all 
the literal water on earth would not cleanse a sinner 
so as to enable him to " walk in newness of life" But 
the baptism of the Spirit can and does. Now what 
baptism is meant in the text, water, or Spirit ? 

Is the inference not that like as Christ was raised by 
the Father, so we are raised from the grave of sin to 
walk in newness of life. None can deny that the rais- 
ing - of Christ by the Father was by a divine, a spiritual 
power, and if the text says of us, 'Like as Christ was 
raised" we cannot say that the baptism means that of 
literal water. Christ's baptism is of the Spirit, in 
contrast with the law's, which was water. 

Gal. 3:27 says : " For as many of you as have been 
baptized into Christ (not into water) have put on 
Christ" Surely no intelligent Bible Christian will 
say that ten thousand immersions in water would 
baptize a person " into Christ " or give power to 
"put on Christy But "by one Spirit are we all 

BAPTIZED INTO OXE BODY." — I Cor, 12:13. 

In the dispensation of grace no baptism is to con- 
tinue in force except the baptism of Christ, and as 
His baptism is of the Spirit only, therefore water bap- 
tism is not Christ's, and is no longer in force. Some 
will say that water baptism is the outward sign of the 
inward cleansing. How devoid of spiritual discern- 



56 ABOLISHED RITES. 

ment is such reasoning;. If a person don't prove by 
the life, walk and conversation that regeneration has 
taken place, a million dips into water could not prove 
it. On the other hand, an infidel might be baptized 
in water, but it would not prove that he was a Saint. 

Col. 2:12 says: "Buried with Him in baptism 
(nothing 1 is said of water), wherein also ye are risen 
with Him through the faith of the operation of 
God, who hath raised Him from the dead." People 
whose spiritual discernment has been clouded by tra- 
ditional teaching and training understand this burial 
to be in a stream or pool of water (as we once did), 
and that a man must raise the dripping body out of 
the water ! But does the verse mention water? Does 
it say we are raised by man, or by God? If we are 
raised with Christ " through the faith of the operation 
of God" has a man anything to do with it ? And is 
water connected with a transaction that is said to be 
wrought " by the operation of God?" 

Christ's burial in the grave was literal, and those 
who want to couple it thus with a literal water bap- 
tism by immersion must remember that to actually 
follow it the candidate would have to remain three 
days under water. 

In favor of water some quote John 3:5, " Except a 
man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot 
enter into the kingdom of God." Here we under- 
stand the word water to mean the Word. We have 
this proven in 1 Peter 1:23, "Being born again, not 
of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word 
of God." Again, "That He might sanctify and 
cleanse it with the washing of "water by the Word." 
— Eph. 5:26. 

" He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved ; 
but he that believeth not shall be damned."— Mark 
16:16. Ritualists say that this means water, but the 
text does not say so. Whom shall we believe ? Dip 
an unregenerate man into water, and an unsaved sinner 
he comes out. But when a man truly repents of sin, 
and with the heart believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, 



ABOLISHED RITES. 5/ 

be receives a spiritual washing" and cleansing, a gen- 
uine renewal of the inner man, in contrast with which 
spiritual baptism, a plunge in literal water is but a 
hollow form. 

As the above-mentioned baptism in Mark 16:16 is 
Christ's, which is spiritual in fulfillment of John's, 
which was water, how can it refer to water baptism ? 
Even if this text and those above should plainly refer 
to water (which they do not), still it, with everything- 
typical, became void after Heb. 9:10. " / i?ideed have 
baptized you with water: but He shall baptize you 
with the Holy Ghost." — Mark 1:8. 4< He must in- 
crease, but I must decrease." — John 3:30. " For. 
John truly baptized with water ; but ye shall be 
baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days 
hence." — Acts 1:5. 

William B. Orvis, an eminent Baptist minister and 
author, in "Ritualism Dethroned" says : " Why per- 
petuate both the type and the anti-type under the same 
dispensation ? Why need the symbol when you 
already possess the reality ? Why look at a shadow 
when you see the substance ? Why look at a satellite 
when you can behold the sun itself ? Why look 
through a glass darkly, when you behold with open 
face the glory of the Lord ? Why stoop to a carnal 
element, when you have already the correspondent 
spiritual essence ? or why mingle Judaism with Chris- 
tianity ?" 

" A larg-e class of persons have dwelt so much on 
the subject of baptism that whenever they read the 
term baptism in the Bible, or even the term water, 
they seem to take it for granted that water baptism is 
intended, unless the evidence to the contrary is pal- 
pable on the very face of the passag-e. Thus, when 
they read such passag-es as John 3:5, ' Except a man 
be born of water and of the Spirit ;' Heb. 10:22, ' Hav- 
ing- our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and 
our bodies washed with pure water ;' Titus 3:5, 'By 
the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the 



58 ABOLISHED RITES. 

Holy Ghost ;' Eph. 5:26, ' That He might sanctify and 
cleanse it (the Church) with the washing- of water by 
the Word/ and 1 John 5:8, * There are three that bear 
witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the 
blood/ they almost invariably assume that water bap- 
tism is designated by the term ' water ' or the wash- 
ing. So, more especially, when the word baptism or 
its cognate is found, they have no other thought than 
that water baptism is the thing specified. Take the 
following passages, Mark 16:16, 'He that believeth 
and is baptized shall be saved / 1 Cor. 10:2, ' And 
were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the 
sea / Rom. 6:4, ' Buried with Him by baptism / Eph. 
4:5, ' One Lord, one faith, one baptism / in these and 
all similar passages this class of interpreters find 
nothing but water baptism/' 

"Water, being an element that purifies, and also 
most cheering and reviving in a desert and sultry 
clime ; yea, even essential to life itself, everywhere, is 
much used metaphorically to describe the joys and 
spiritual graces of religion, and the purifying influences 
of God's Word and Spirit, and even of the blood of 
Christ itself. And so, the term baptism (the term 
denoting purifying in its literal import) is often used 
to signify a moral cleansing, whether by the Holy 
Ghost or by faith in Christ, t. e. y faith uniting to 
Christ, and the imbibing or receiving a new life from 
Christ. We will cite a few of the many passages of 
Scripture where the term water is thus used meta- 
phorically, as above stated, and then let us see whether 
the term baptism is also thus used : Psa. 23:2, ' He 
leadeth me beside the still waters / Isa. 44:3, ' I will 
pour water upon him that is thirsty / Isa. 55:1, ' Ho, 
every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters / Jer. 
2:13, ' My people * * * have forsaken me the fountain 
of living waters/ Ez. 36:25, 'Then will I sprinkle 
clean water upon you / Zech. 14:8, ' Living waters 
shall go out from Jerusalem / John 4:10, ' He would 
have given thee living water / John 4:14, ' Shall be in 
him a well of water / Heb. 10:22, ' Having our hearts 



ABOLISHED RITES. 59 

sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies 
washed with pure water ;' 2 Peter 2:17, ' Wells with- 
out water ;' Jude 12, ' Clouds without water ;' 1 John 
5:6,7,8, ' Came by water and blood,' ' three that bear 
record, Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost ;' 
Rev. 7:17, ' The Lamb * * * shall lead them unto liv- 
ing" fountains of waters ;' — 21:6, ' I will give unto him 
that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life,' — 
22:1, ' He showed me a pure river of water of life,' etc. 
So, water is often used to represent people's troubles, 
afflictions, etc., as ' Though the Lord give you * * * 
the water of affliction.' — Is. 30:20. In the above cases, 
you will perceive, water is used metaphorically ? And 
now, we ask, is the term baptism also used meta- 
phorically ? The evidence is just as clear. See Luke 
12:50, ' I have a baptism to be baptized with ; and 
how am I straitened till it be accomplished ;' Matt. 
20:22, ' Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall 
drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I 
am baptized with ?' It is certainly here metaphorically 
used to represent sufferings. So, Christian writers 
often speak of a baptism of love, of power, of tears, of 
blood, of sorrow 7 , and of sufferings, etc." 

" So all those passages which speak of being: bap- 
tized into Christ (and they are many) refer to the 
soul being" consecrated to Christ, and purified by His 
Spirit — having no reference whatever to water bap- 
tism. So, in every passage which speaks of being- 
baptized with the Holy Ghost (or with fire), of course 
no water is there included, and these passages are also 
many." 

" In Mark 16:16, baptism is ranked with a spiritual 
grace, which every one knows is essential to salvation ; 
a purely mental state or exercise ! Now, does Jesus 
Christ intend to rank a purely external rite thus with 
an internal grace as essential to salvation ? Does -He 
thus join things utterly dissimilar and incongruous ? 
We think not ! wSpiritual baptism or purifying, like 
faith, is essential to salvation — water baptism, every 
one knows, is not. (The same incongruity may be 



60 ABOLISHED RITES. 

noted in the common interpretation of Eph. 4:5, where 
baptism is also ranked with faith.") 

"In Matt. 28:19, the second clause of the verse 
'baptizing- them/ etc., appears to be expletive, refer- 
ring- to the manner or result of obeying the command, 
i Go ye therefore, and teach (disciple) all nations.' 
How or to what end ? ' Baptizing (or purifying) 
them into the name of the. Father, and of the Son, and 
of the Holy Ghost/" 

" Paul received the apostolic commission here given, 
yet he says, 1 Cor. 1:17, ' Christ sent me not to bap- 
tize, but to preach the gospel/ He is here discours- 
ing on the dissensions that had already arisen concern- 
ing ritual baptism. And could he thus disavow the 
obligation to baptize, had Christ commanded water 
baptism in Matt. 28:19 ? Most manifestly he could 
not. But in the 14th to the 16th verses of the chapter 
( 1 Cor. 1 ) the apostle thanks God that he had bap- 
tized so few. What should we think of an apostle 
that thanks God, that he has not obeyed the command 
of his Divine Master ! which is the case with Paul, if 
water baptism is intended in Matt. 28:19." 

" Paul says, Eph. 4:5, ' One Lord, one faith, one 
baptism/ by which, as hinted above, it would be in- 
congruous to understand water baptism as one act, or 
one mode of baptism, as some argue, but one real 
baptism ; the true gospel baptism — the essential 
baptism of the Holy Ghost." 

"These passages, Matt. 28:19, an d Mark 16:16, are 
doubtless parallels, and have parallels in the other 
evangelists. They all unquestionably record thesame 
commission, and those parallel passages are Luke 
24:45 50, and John 20:21-23." 

" In Luke (24:47) the injunction is, that, repentance 
and remission of sins should be preached, to which end 
the disciples were to tarry until they were endowed 
with power from on high. In John (20:22-23) it is 
said that Jesus breathed on them, saying, ' Receive ye 
the Holy Ghost/ and immediately adds, ' whose soever 
sins ye remit, they are remitted, unto them ; and whose 



ABOLISHED RITES. 6l 

soever sins ye retain, they are retained.' Now, with our 
interpretation of the great commission, and of the term 
baptize as there employed, the meaning- of these passages 
is clear. The apostles and other disciples were to 
preach the gospel under the influence of the Holy 
Ghost sent down from Heaven — and thus instrumen- 
tal^ secure the baptism of the Holy Ghost upon 
others — and consequently the forgiving- and purifying 
of their sins, a thing" which could in nowise be secured 
by water baptism. Spiritual purification then, is 
clearly the thing- enjoined. Thus we have the four 
evangelists perfectly harmonized, and each equally 
harmonized with Paul, i Cor i:i/ r and Eph. 4:5." 

" Keeping in mind the common use of the term bap- 
tism, to represent any species of purifying, and that 
the spiritual was that sought by the gospel of Jesus 
Christ, will help us out of many difficulties on the 
subject, and save us from those endless blunders, and 
the present perils of teaching- the doctrine of baptis- 
mal regeneration. Had the term baptize been trans- 
lated purify or convert, — as Beecher and Campbell 
have abundantly shown ought to have been — aye, as 
it has been, i. <?., by its cognate 'wash/ whenever it 
has been translated in the New Testament, much ob- 
scurity and liability to carnalize the meaning, would 
have been removed." 

" Keep it before the mind, that salvation is not in 
any outward form, ' not of works,' lest any man should 
boast, as though he were his own saviour : nor is it 
hinged on any contingency of what one man may do 
outwardly for another : salvation is not conveyed, nor 
withheld thus by any interposing medium. Man is not 
thus at the mercy of an administrator, or dependent 
on priestly or canonical absolution for pardon or puri- 
fying. Let this dogma of the Papacy be seen in its 
legitimate bearings, and it will explode the whole 
fabric of ritualism from topstone to the foundation." 
' Union of Christians can never be attained on the 
basis of agreement in forms — never was — never will 
be, — nor even by agreement in non-essentials of any 



62 ABOLISHED RITES. 

kind. Neither can we believe that God has placed 
any such barrier in the way. The divine law cannot 
be accused of any such absurdity as to require both 
agreement and union, where only one is possible. 
Nay, we had better drop the carnal ordinances, and 
take the spiritual counter-type — drop the type, and 
take the anti-type. In Holy Spirit baptism we have 
all the Christian graces— all the fruits of holiness, and 
endless peace, in the churches also ; aye, in the happy 
exchange, we have lost sight of the shadow, but have 
grasped the substance." 

"And this attempt to plead God's authority for and 
magnify the importance of water baptism, manifests 
the fatuity and utter delusion of ritualism in all the 
Christian ages. It is the perverter and crucifier of 
rightly directed Christian zeal and love — the bane of 
revivals — the stumbling- stone ever in the way of 
young* converts — the illusion that rivets the chains of 
sect — the folly and madness that renders the labors of 
Christ's peacemakers useless, because fruitless — the 
idol that dethrones Christ as our Saviour, our life, and 
our union — and the apology for the besetting sin of 
bigotry, that undervalues and grieves forever away the 
Holy Spirit from so many nominal brotherhoods in 
the Christian faith." 

" Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudi- 
ments of the world, why, as though living in the world, 

ARE YE SUBJECT TO ORDINANCES?' (Col. 2120.) 

'Blotting out the hand-writing of ordinances that was 
against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out 
of the way, nailing it to His cross.' (Col. 2:14.) 
* Which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers 
washings (Greek and German baptisms), and carnal 

ORDINANCES, IMPOSED ON THEM UNTIL THE TIME OF 

reformation.' " (Heb. 9:10.) 

" The proof-texts we here cite will bear as appropri- 
ately against the doctrine of the divine appointment 
and sacredness of the one ordinance as the other ; since 
they both partake equally of the nature of a ' hand- 
writing,' or a ' carnal ordinance ; ' differing not at all 



ABOLISHED RITES. 63 

in this respect from any Jewish ceremonial, whether it 
were the passover, the * feast of weeks,' ' pentecost,' or 
any of their ' divers baptisms/ ' 

"I know it has been customary to interpret the 
passages I shall cite, as referring- to the Jewish cere- 
monial law, but not as referring to a Christian ceremo- 
nial law! Now, where these Bible interpreters ob- 
tained their distinction between the two ritual systems 
(if two there be), the writer certainly is uninformed. 
If any of them will show me what passages in the 
New Testament, which war against the bondage of 
ordinances and rituals, refer to the Jewish and which 
to the Christian dispensation — or will do that which is 
equivalent, viz.: show that they all refer to the Jewish 
ceremonial law, and cannot, either in fact or in the 
nature of thing's, have any reference to Christian ordi- 
nances (I use a borrowed term), I will confess myself 
much enlightened. " 

" Now, is it not demonstrably certain, that this whole 
process of making a distinction between Jewish and 
Christian ordinances is not only a distinction without 
a difference, but has also grown out of the assumption 
that Jesus Christ or the apostles have instituted certain 
ordinances, and hence these apostolic warnings against 
ordinances must be assumed not to refer to the Chris- 
tian, but to the Jewish ordinances ? Is there, in fact, 
any other foundation for the supposed distinction than 
this bare assumption ? We certainly know of none 
other. The truth is, the whole drift of Paul's reason- 
ing on the subject shows that he regarded the evil of 
the Jewish ritual law to consist, not in the fact that it 
was inapt or inappropriate to the Christian dispensa- 
tion, but in that it was a ritual law. Baptism with 
water is the same in one dispensation that it is in an- 
other : so is a ceremonial feast. If the one is a 
1 carnal ordinance/ the other cannot be conversely a 
spiritual one !" 

" Paul is not to be supposed to have labored in 
nearly all his epistles so earnestly to break the power 
of a ritual law, merely to supplant the one by another, 



64 ABOLISHED RITES. 

which, in verity, is no better ; but, in fact, if estab- 
lished, is left far more indefinite than the former. Who 
can read Paul's epistles to the Romans, his first and 
second to the Corinthians, his epistle to the Galatians, 
the Ephesians, the Colossians ; his epistles to Timo- 
thy and Titus, and to the Hebrews, without reaching* 
the utmost strength of conviction that he was laying 
the axe at the root of the tree of ritualism, and en- 
deavoring to direct both Jew and Gentile to the true 
spiritual nature of the Christian religion, and to the 
passing away of signs and symbols, by the glorious 
coming of Him who is the true anti-type — the presence 
and all-glorious substance ?" 

"Take specific passages: Heb. 9:10, * Which stood 
only in meats and drinks, and divers washings (bap- 
tisms), and carnal ordinances, imposed on them witil 
the time of reformation. 9 Now, in the context of this 
chapter, for two chapters preceding and two or three 
succeeding, the apostle has grouped together nearly 
every element of the Jewish law, and sacrificial and 
ritual services, and enumerated them thus with their 
baptisms ; and, having done this, he contrasts them 
all with the truly spiritual services of the Christian 
dispensation. Mark : he does not contrast them with 
certain substituted forms and rituals of the New Cove- 
nant, but contrasts the forms of the Old with the 
spirituality of the New. 'The priesthood being 
changed/ (he says, Heb. 7:12) 'there is made of neces- 
sity a change also of the law/ i. e., the ritual gives 
place to the spiritual. Under the old law all things 
were to be made according to the outward pattern 
shown in the mount. In the ninth chapter all these 
earthly forms and figures are shown to have given 
place to the heavenly." 

" So, also, in the context of the passage we cited 
from Colossians, baptism is grouped with other cere- 
monials, and especially with that in the stead of which 
it is said to stand, viz.: circumcision; and the Chris- 
tian is directed (not to baptism in its place) but to 
that circumcision made without hands, as in Hebrews, 



ABOLISHED RITES. 65 

to the tabernacle which the Lord pitched, and not 
man, and (Col. 2:12) to the baptism wherein we rise 
with Christ through the faith of the operation of God. 
That is the kind of baptism we need ; and the kind of 
circumcision also. And either of these in the outward 
form are equally the handwriting- of ordinances, which 
ever were against the universal peace and unity of the 
church, and hence, as Paul tells us, are blotted out, 
nailing them to His cross, and triumphing over them 
ink." 

"In Rom. 6:1-5, our attention is unquestionably 
turned from the outward to the same spiritual bap- 
tism. In Eph. 2:15, we have almost precisely similar 
language in respect to ordinances as that quoted above 
from Col. 2, except that neither circumcision nor bap- 
tism are specifically mentioned. In Eph. 2:15, the 
enmity, even the law of commandments contained in 
ordinances, is said to be abolished to make of twain 
one new man, so making peace. And in 1 Cor. 12:13, 
we are said by one Spirit to be all baptized into one 
body. Now you perfectly well know that this was 
never done by any one outward baptism, for the out- 
ward tends to the reverse. The admission of a cere- 
monial law of any kind has ever proved, as Paul 
reasons in 2 Cor. 3, a ministration of death, and fills 
with that zeal of the Pharisee the same apostle speaks 
of in Phil. 3, which leads to persecution of the church, 
and not at all characteristic of that spiritual house, 
that chosen generation, that royal priesthood, which 
Peter so graphically describes (1 Peter 2) as offering 
spiritual sacrifices." 

Dr. Halley, who published seven lectures on ordi- 
nances in 1844, complains as follows : " That he finds 
the subject fraught with long and wearisome contro- 
versies, and perplexed with difficulties, so that cause 
is afforded to such as deny the perpetuity of those rites 
to entertain serious objections to the views of the 
several parties, seeing that they cannot agree among 
themselves on the meaning of the commission and 



66 ABOLISHED RITES. 

authority which they, say they have received for these 
observances. Each party deprecates, refutes, and 
severely denounces the views of others ! There seems, 
indeed, no refuge from such difficulties, but in taking a 
spiritual view of the baptism required. The washing 
away of sin is a solemn reality, and no ceremonial 
representation ; to be performed by the Holy Spirit, 
and not by man himself." 

Bishop Barlow, of Lincoln, writes: " There is 
neither precept nor example for pedo-baptism, nor any 
just evidence of it for about two hundred years after 
Christ. Tertullian condemns it as an unwarrantable 
custom ; and Nazianzen, a good while after him, dis- 
likes it too. In the primitive times they were Cate- 
chumeni, then Illuminati or Baptizati. The truth is 
that pedo-baptism came into the world in the Second 
Century, and in the Third and Fourth began to be 
practiced, though not generally, and defended as law- 
ful from the mistaken text, John 3:5. On the same 
gross mistake of John 6:53, they did for many cen- 
turies, both in the Greek and Latin churches, give the 
Lord's Supper to infants, and I confess they might do 
both as well as either/' 

Samuel Drew, a noted Methodist minister, and one 
of the very able metaphysical reasoners of his day, 
says concerning a work by Robert Barclay, the 
Quaker Reformer: "I have never yet met with any 
arguments for the perpetuity of water-baptism so con- 
clusive as those of Robert Barclay against its contin- 
uance. It is, I think, but fair to conclude that if this 
were to be a standing ordinance, more explicit direc- 
tions would have been left concerning it." 

Dr. Trapp, of Oxford, declares : " With water the 
pollution of the flesh is put away, but by Christ's bap- 
tism with the Spirit the answer of a good conscience is 
known, purged from dead works to Godward." 



ABOLISHED RITES. 67 

William Dell, a minister of Caius College, Cam- 
bridge, in his treatise on the Doctri?ie of Baptism, 
says : " The baptism of Christ is Spirit or fire baptism ; 
and this is the one and only baptism of the New Tes- 
tament. Its outward instrument is not material 
water, but the Word ; as Christ shows, where He says, 
' teach, baptizing-/ showing that teaching the Word is 
the outward means of baptizing with the Spirit, which 
is sufficient for all the faithful. He that is truly 
washed from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, what 
need hath he of material water to be poured on his 
body, under the pretence of any sign whatever, when 
he hath the truth, substance, and heavenly thing 
itself?" 

Dr. Wardlaw says : "It is surely little better than 
trifling to institute an inquiry whether those on whom 
the ' promise of the Father/ the ' power from on high ' 
so wonderfully came, were ever subjected to the 
sprinkling or the immersion of water ! In such a case 
it was a matter of very little moment, indeed, whether 
they were, or were not. That they were not seems far 
more likely ; perhaps, may be held for certain. They 
were already believers in the resurrection of Jesus and 
their baptism — not the mere emblem, but the celestial 
reality — came immediately from the hand of their 
glorified Master ; who having ' ascended up on high, 
He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.' 
(Eph. 4:8.) He ' being by the right hand of God ex- 
alted' (Acts 2:33) shed forth that which the assem- 
bled multitudes saw and heard with such overwhelm- 
ing amazement. Truly the baptism with water might 
well be dispensed with for this. 1 ' 

Dr. Cumming says: "To bring man directly to 
God, just as he is, is the grand characteristic of true 
religion. To keep man from God, and detain him 
with the priest, the sacraments, the ceremony, is the 
grand effort of all false religions. We may not place 
baptism in the room of the Holy Spirit, nor the 



68 ABOLISHED RITES. 

eucharist in the place of the Lord Jesus. We must 
look far above and beyond them both." 

John Allen says : " While many Christians profess 
to believe that baptism or sprinkling- with water was 
enjoined by our Lord, and is productive of spiritual 
blessings, such will do well to apply the simple text 
which He recommended : ' Ye shall know them by 
their fruits' (Matt. 7:16), and to consider whether 
those who have received the rite give evidence in their 
lives of any high benefits derived from it ; or whether, 
on the contrary, it has been totally unproductive of 
spiritual grace, leaving them in the same position as 
those who have never received it. If the latter must 
be admitted, then another reflection forcibly arises, 
whether the nature of our Lord's injunction has not 
been mistaken by giving it an outward interpretation 
when He designed it to be understood in a spiritual 
sense." 

Henry Hammond, Chaplain to King- Charles I, 
says in his Annotations on the New Testament : " Is 
not Christ the end of ceremonies, types, figures and 
shadows? John's water-baptism, and all the shadows 
of Moses were to endure but for a time, for as all the 
prophets were until John, so John was until Christ ; 
and Christ by His internal washing — the laver of re- 
generation — fulfilled and ended not only Moses' laver, 
but John's Jordan washing- also, by fulfilling inwardly 
that which they represented outwardly." 

In a work entitled " Christian Baptism Spiritual, 
not Ritual" Dr. Robert McNaer, a noted Presbyte- 
rian minister says: " Whatever is meant by the words 
' born of water and of the Spirit/ is absolutely neces- 
sary to salvation. But will the Protestant venture to 
affirm, in the ritual sense, that no unbaptized man, 
woman, or child can be saved? If this be so, who then 
can be sure that he is safe? And what is the inquirer 
to do? or when may he rest satisfied that he is born of 



ABOLISHED RITES. 69 

water? so long" as the vexed questions of who are 
authorized to administer the ordinance, and which is 
the divine mode of administration, remain unsettled? ,, 

" If born of water means baptized with water, then 
this baptism he must have, or he can never see the 
kingdom. But there is another view supported by 
the names of such men as Calvm, Lampe, Tholuck, 
and others, a view analogous to that which we were 
led to adopt of the words ' baptize with the Holy 
Ghost and fire* and which, with perhaps slight modi- 
fications, regards the words as equivalent to, born of 
the cleansing , purifying Spirit. Says McCue, To 
be born of w T ater and of the Spirit is just to be born 
of the Spirit purifying the soul as water does the body.' 
If this be a correct exposition, it gives no countenance 
whatever to a rite, but refers solely to the operation 
of the Spirit/' 

"The general conclusion which I derive from the 
foregoing is, that Christian baptism is the baptism of 
the Spirit; that there is no authority in the New Testa- 
ment for a ritual baptism in the present dispensation; 
but that when Jesus said, ' Go ye therefore, and teach 
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, 
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost/ He inculcated 
upon disciples the duty of imparting spiritual influences, 
of converting shiners, and building up converts in their 
most holy faith." 

" But let it be fairly understood that baptism with 
water is not a gospel ordinance, and men may come 
to inquire what that baptism is which saves. Let it 
be given out that compliance with rites does not bring 
men any nearer Heaven, and is not required by God, 
and they may be stirred up to ask what is the bond 
that unites to the Saviour? If many should feel that 
with the rite they have lost their all, they have been 
leaning upon a broken reed, and may be led to flee for 
refuge even yet to the Ark of Safety — the Lord Jesus 
Christ." 

Walter Brute, an English reformer, said: " Faith is 



JO ABOLISHED RITES. 

a spiritual water, springing- from Him, the fountain of 
wisdom, wherein the soul of the sinner is washed from 
sin. With this water were the faithful patriarchs bap- 
tized before the law ; and the faithful people of the 
Hebrews, and the faithful Christians, after the law. 
Many Christians are saved without the sacrament of 
baptism in water. Are not all baptized with the Holy 
Ghost, and with fire? — but not with material fire. 
Thus, no more is the lotion of corporeal water neces- 
sary to wash away sins, but only spiritual water; that 
is to say, the water of faith" 

John Saltmarsh, an eminent minister of the Church 
of England, published a discourse against water bap- 
tism, in which he said: " No outward ordinance nor 
ministration of the creature can convey or confer pure 
spiritual things. Also, that the baptism of water is 
not Christ's baptism, or of His administration, but 
John's and his ministry; and, therefore, that Christ 
never gave it to His disciples in their first commis- 
sions to preach to the Jews, nor baptized He any 
Himself, nor doth it appear that in Matthew 28:19 He 
meant baptism by water, but by the Spirit.' ' 

John Bunyan, the author of " The Pilgrim s Prog- 
ress" (died A. D. 1688), says: "If a man cannot 
show himself to be a Christian without water baptism, 
he cannot show himself to be one by it. As for the 
pins and tacks of the tabernacle, they were expressly 
commanded, and when you have proved by the Word 
of God that you ought to shut the Saints out of your 
communion for the want of baptism, then you may be- 
gin, justly, to make your parallel. It rests with you 
to prove that baptism is the fruit of faith, or that faith 
ought to be tied to take its first step in water-baptism! 
Go but ten doors from home, and see how many would be 
known by this livery that they had put on Christ. 
You quite forget that text, ' By this shall all men 
know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to 
another' (John 13.35). By laws and ordinances you 
will not be saved, since you came not in by the door." 



ABOLISHED RITES. /I 

Richard Claridge says: "Water-baptism was no 
ordinance of Christ, but belonged to John's ministry, 
and was one of those ' divers washings ' mentioned in 
Hebrews 9:10, and is there ranked with 'carnal ordi- 
nances, imposed until the time of reformation.' Long" 
before John's time, not only natives, but strangers 
were received into covenant, not only by circumcision, 
but baptism : see Poole and Hammond on Matt. 
3:1-12. And Hammond in his Letter of Resolution 
to Six Queries, says, ' The whole fabric of water- 
baptism is built upon this basis — the customary bap- 
tism among the Jews' Xow, can we think that that 
should be instituted for a gospel ordinance which was 
an old Jewish rite, and at best but a shadow or figure 
of a better thing to come, viz., the cleansing and puri- 
fving of the heart and conscience bv the baptism of the 
Holy Ghost?" 

" Again water-baptism was no ordinance of Christ, 
since Christ did not institute or command water-bap- 
tism, nor did Christ Himself baptize with water. And 
John, who was sent from God, testifies that while he 
himself baptized with water, Christ should baptize 
with the Holy Ghost and with fire. The difference 
between them is thus plainly stated. And Christ 
Himself (Acts 1:5) repeats the distinction between 
them, for ' John truly baptized with water ; but ye 
shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days 
hence/ And Peter could not deny the distinction. 
Acts 11:16, ' Then remembered I the word of the Lord, 
how that He said, John indeed baptized with water; but 

YE SHALL BE BAPTIZED WITH THE HOLY GHOST.' Can 

anything be plainer than that the former was John's 
baptism and not Christ's, and the latter Christ's and 
not John's ? This is manifest from the testimony of 
John, Christ, and Peter ! " 

"When thou citest Matt. 28:19 for water-baptism, 
remember that water is not in the text ; but the Holy 
Ghost is, for the commission reads, ' Go ye therefore, 
and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of 
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' 



J2 ABOLISHED RITES. 

To baptize into the name, is to baptize into the power, 
for so the word frequently signifies in the Holy Scrip- 
tures ; see Psa. 9:10 and 75:1 ; Prov. 18:10 ; Isa. 25:1, 
and 26:8,13 ; Jer. 10:6; Matt. 18:20; Luke 10:17 ; John 
1:12 and 2:2s, and 20:31 ; Acts 3:16, and 4:10,12 ; and 
many other places. The apostles did not baptize into 
the bare name, consisting- of so many letters and syl- 
lables, but into the power of that most glorious and 
excellent name, for the power of God attended their 
ministry. Their preaching- was ' in demonstration of 
the Spirit and of power,' 1 Cor. 2:4. The baptism of 
the Spirit went along with their ministry of the Word. 5 ' 

Joseph Bessee, who wrote about 1730, testifies thus : 
" All types have ceased in point of obligation. 
Water-baptism was a type ; therefore water-baptism 
has ceased in point of obligation. It is proved from 
the coming of the antitype, else they would be in 
force together. This would be equivalent to setting 
up the first tabernacle again, with its figures, and to 
justifying the Jews in their meats, and. drinks, and 
divers baptisms, and carnal ordinances imposed on 
them only until the time of reformation. That water- 
baptism was a type is clear, in that it was a figure of 
that inward and spiritual washing which is only ef- 
fected by the baptism of Christ. That the baptism of 
Christ was prefigured by John, John himself testifies 
when he says, ' I indeed baptize you with water, unto 
repentance : but He that cometh after me * * * shall 
baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.' 
(Matt. 3:11,12.) So Christ testifies, 'John truly bap- 
tized with water ; but ye shall be baptized with the 
Holy Ghost.' (Acts 1:5.) And Peter bears the same 
witness, ' Then remembered I the word of the Lord, 
how that He said, John indeed baptized with water ; 
but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost.' (Acts 
11:16.) John's baptism with water could only purify 
the flesh; Christ's baptism, the antitype, purifies the 
heart and conscience." 

" That which was not instituted by Christ is null in 



ABOLISHED RITES. 73 

point of obligation. Water-baptism was not insti- 
tuted by Christ ; therefore, null in point of obligation. 
The Great Commission (Matt. 28:19) required the 
apostles to be ' witnesses ' of Christ's power in the 
Holy Ghost, in the ' ministration of the Spirit/ not in 
the ministration of water-baptism.'' 

"That which Christ required in the great commis- 
sion was the preaching of the gospel. The practice of 
the apostles was conformable thereto, and the conse- 
quence was, the baptism of the Holy Ghost. ' While 
Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all 
them which heard the Word.' (Acts 10:44.) The 
apostles preached ' in demonstration of the Spirit and 
of power,' as Paul saith : ' Our gospel came not unto 
you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy 
Ghost!" (1 Thess. 1:5.) 

Joseph J. Gurney says : " Under the gospel dispen- 
sation the worship of God is at once simple and spir- 
itual ; it is the communion of the soul of man with 
his Creator, by the direct influence of the Spirit, and 
through the sole mediation of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
Consistently with this truth, all observances in worship 
which are of a purely ceremonial nature, all mere 
types and shadows, are by a general law abolished. 
They are at once fulfilled and abrogated by the great 
realities of the gospel of Christ." 

" John, who lived under the law, baptized by divine 
authority; and Jesus Himself submitted to his baptism 
as part of the righteousness which then was. The 
apostles observed the rite, as they did a variety of 
other Jewish ceremonies, and having connected it in 
their practice with conversion to Christianity, they 
applied it even to the Gentiles. But Christ Himself, 
as the Institutor of the gospel dispensation, baptized 
not; and Paul, who to a great extent personally ab- 
stained from the use of this ceremony, declared that 
he had received no commission from Christ to per- 
form it." 

" Had a typical ceremony thus binding on the 



74 ABOLISHED RITES. 

church been here instituted, the analogy of the Jewish 
law would lead us to expect the most precise direc- 
tions as to the persons who should perform it, and as 
to the manner, times and circumstances in which it 
should be performed. But no such directions are 
given, and Christians who admit the continued author- 
ity of the rite, are left, in reference to these particu- 
lars, in a state of irremediable doubt and dispute/' 

" In the meantime Christianity has a baptism of its 
own, of which our Lord and His apostles made fre- 
quent mention, without attaching" to it the condition 
or accompaniment of any outward ceremony. It is 
that of Christ Himself, ' with the Holy Ghost and 
with fire; ' and is productive of a new birth, by the 
Spirit. It is the baptism which ' now saveth us,' and 
which brings the ' answer of a good conscience toward 
God, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ; ' it is the 
washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy 
Ghost.' This baptism properly agrees with the nature 
and character of Christianity, and coincides with that 
worship of God, which is ' in spirit and in truth.' 
Without it the sinner cannot be converted, or joined 
in fellowship with the church ; without it, the soul of 
the believer can never be prepared for an entrance into 
Heaven. Whatsoever opinion, therefore, they may 
entertain respecting the ceremonial rite, this is the 
baptism on which Christians of every denomination 
ought chiefly to insist, and in so doing they will not 
fail to experience ' the unity of the Spirit in the bond 
of peace.' " 

Thomas Clarkson says : "If, again, I were to make 
an assertion to divines, that Jesus Christ came to put 
an end to the ceremonious part of the Jewish law, and 
to the types and shadows belonging to the Jewish dis- 
pensation, they would not deny it. But baptism and 
the supper were both of them outward Jewish cere- 
monies, connected with the Jewish religion. They 
were both of them types and shadows, of which the 
antitypes and substances had been realized at the 



ABOLISHED RITES. 75 

death of Christ. And therefore a presumption arises 
again, that these were not intended to be continued." 

" On the subject of baptism, there is ground for 
argument as to the meaning" of -the word ' baptize/ 
This word, in consequence of its representation of a 
watery ceremony, is usually connected with water in 
our minds. But it may also very consistently be con- 
nected even with fire. Its general meaning is to 
purify. In this sense many understand it ; and those 
who do, and who apply it to the great command of 
Jesus to His disciples, think they give a better inter- 
pretation of it than those who connect it with water ; 
for they think it more reasonable that the apostles 
should have been enjoined to go into all nations, and 
to endeavor to purify the hearts of individuals, by the 
Spirit and power of their preaching, from the dross of 
heathen notions, and to lead them to spirituality of 
mind, by the inculcation of gospel principles, than to 
dip them under water, as an essential part of their new 
religion/' 

' It appears, then, that there are two baptisms re- 
corded in Scripture, the one the baptism of John, the 
other that of Christ ; that these are distinct from one 
another, and that the one does not include the other. 
Now St. Paul speaks only of one baptism that is effec- 
tual ; and St. Peter must mean the same when he 
speaks of the baptism that saveth. The question 
therefore is, which of the two baptisms, that have 
been mentioned, is the one effectual or saving bap- 
tism ; or which of these is it that Jesus included in 
His great commission to the apostles when He com- 
manded them to * go and teach all nations, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and 
of the Holy Ghost/ " 

" In the first place, St. Peter says it was not in these 
words, ' Which sometime were disobedient, when once 
the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, 
while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight 
souls were saved by water. The like figure where- 
unto even baptism doth also now save us (not the put- 



y6 ABOLISHED RITES. 

tingf away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a 
good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ/ (i Peter 3:20,21.; The apostle states 
here concerning the baptism that is effectual and sav- 
ing" : first, that it is not the putting away of the filth 
of the flesh, which is effected by water. He carefully 
puts those upon their guard to whom he writes, lest 
they should consider John's baptism, or that of water, 
to be the saving one to which he alludes ; for having 
made a comparison between an outward salvation in 
an outward ark, by the outw T ard water, with this in- 
ward salvation, by inward and spiritual water, in the 
inward ark of the testament, he is fearful that his 
reader should connect these images, and fancy that 
water had anything to do with this baptism. Hence 
he put his caution in a parenthesis, thus guarding his 
meaning in an extraordinary manner." 

" He then shows what this baptism is, and calls it 
' the answer of a good conscience toward God by the 
resurrection of Jesus Christ.' In fact, he states it 
to be the baptism of Christ, which is by the Spirit ; for 
he maintains, that he only is truly baptized whose 
conscience is made clear by the resurrection of Christ 
in his heart. But who can make the answer of such a 
conscience, unless the Holy Spirit shall have first puri- 
fied the heart ; unless the spiritual fan of Christ shall 
have first separated the wheat from the chaff ; and un- 
less His spiritual fire shall have consumed the latter? " 

" St. Paul makes a similar declaration : ' For as 
many of you as have been baptized into Christ have 
put on Christ.' (Galatians 3:27.) But no man, the 
Quakers say, merely by being dipped under water, can 
put on Christ, that is, can put on His life, His nature 
and disposition, His love, meekness and temperance, 
and all those virtues which should characterize a 
Christian. To the same purport are those other 
words by the same apostle : * Know ye not, that so 
many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were 
baptized into His death ? Therefore we are buried 
with Him by baptism into death : that like as Christ 



ABOLISHED RITES. /7 

was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, 
even so we also should walk in newness of life. 5 
(Rom. 6:3,4.) And again, ' buried with Him in bap- 
tism, wherein also ye are risen with Him through the 
faith of the operation of God, who hath raised Him 
from the dead.' (Col. 2:12.) By these passages the 
apostle Paul testifies, that he alone is truly baptized 
who first dies unto sin, and is raised up afterwards 
from sin unto righteousness ; or who is raised up into 
life with Christ ; or who so feels the inward resurrec- 
tion and glory of Christ in his soul, that he walks in 
newness of life." 

William Penn (died 1718), the founder of the City 
of Philadelphia, and the founder and first Governor of 
Pennsylvania, replied to the Bishop of Cork as follows 
(alluding to Matt. 28:19): " The very text, duly con- 
sidered, will not have it water ; for that could baptize 
none into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy 
Ghost, for so the Greek text requires. For they that 
are baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and 
Holy Ghost, must be baptized of the Holy Ghost, since 
it is to come into their likeness and bear their image, 
which is holiness." 

Again William Penn says : " Water baptism was 
John's, not Christ's, see Matt. 3:11 ; Acts 1:5. Jesus 
never used it, John 4:2. It was no part of Paul's 
commission, which if it were evangelical and of dura- 
tion, it certainly would have been, 1 Cor. 1:14,15,16,17. 
There is but one baptism, as well as one faith, and 
one Lord, Eph. 4:5." 

Again William Penn says in his, " A T o Cross, no 
Crow?i " : " God is a Spirit, and He will be worshiped 
in spirit and in truth. It is not that bodily worship, 
nor these ceremonious services in use among you now, 
that will save or give acceptance with this God who 
is a Spirit. Stephen, that bold and constant martyr 
of Jesus, told the Jews when a prisoner at their bar 



y8 ABOLISHED RITES. 

for disputing- about the end of their beloved temple 
and its services, ' Solomon built Him an house. How- 
beit the Most High dwelleth not in temples made 
with hands/ (Acts 7:47,48.) The martyr follows 
up his blow upon these apostate Jews, who were of 
those times the pompous, ceremonious, worldly wor- 
shipers, (ver. 51.) ' Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised 
in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost : 
as your fathers did, so do ye.' As if he had told 
them, no matter for your outward temple, rites and 
shadowy services. " 

" It were to overthrow the whole Gospel dispensa- 
tion and to make the coming- of Christ of none effect, 
to render signs and figures of the nature of the Gospel, 
which is inward and spiritual. One Lord, one faith, 
one baptism, one bread and one cup of blessing ; that 
is the new wine by the kingdom of God, which is 
within." 

" If it be gospel that he is not a Jew, that is one 
outwardly, nor that circumcision that is outward in 
the flesh , but he is a Jew that is one inwardly, and 
that is circumcision which is of the heart, in the Spirit 
and not in the letter, then unanswerably he is not a 
Christian that is one outwardly, nor is that baptism 
which is outward of the flesh, but he is a Christian 
that is one inwardly, and that is baptism that is of the 
heart, in the Spirit. It is not to be thought that the 
apostle meant to undervalue one observance because 
it is outward, and set up another outward observance, 
viz.: water baptism, in place of it." 

Dr. J. M. Washburn well says: "When the Holy 
Spirit comes into the soul of the believer in a baptism 
which floods it with light, as the sun at noonday floods 
the outward world with light, the person does not 
have ' to read the Jewish law ' to learn that such a 
flood of light has poured into it. But the light in the 
soul is its own witness. And the light is there be- 
cause life from God is there. ' In Him was life ; and 
the life was the light of men/ (John 1:4.) And the 



ABOLISHED RITES. 79 

life of God in the soul witnesses its own presence. The 
witness of God is greater than the witness of men. 
And it is this witness which gives full assurance, and 
is the end of all types and shadows in the economy of 
grace/ ' 

Justin Martyr (died A. D. 167) said to Trypho, a 
Jew: "How can I require that baptism (of water) 
who have been baptized with the Holy Ghost? And 
so many righteous men who have kept none of these 
legal observances have still obtained the express ap- 
proval of God Himself. " 

"If I were to sum all the ordinances which were 
commanded by Closes, I should prove them to be 
types and symbols. The cisterns which you (Jews) 
have dug - out are broken and useless to you. For 
what use is that baptism which cleanses the flesh and 
the body only ? Baptize the soul from anger, and 
from covetousness, and from envy, and from hate, 
and, behold, the body is pure. You, however, receive 
everything - in a carnal sense, and think it to be serving 
God if you do such works, while your souls are filled 
with deceitfulness." 

" Nor do we receive your useless baptism of cis- 
terns, for such bears no relation to the baptism of life. 
You who are circumcised in the flesh require our cir- 
cumcision, while we who possess this have no need of 
yours. This since we had been sinners, we received 
by means of baptism (not the fleshly, which He has oft 
told us is useless, but the spiritual) through the mercy 
of God ; and it would be good for all to receive it like- 
wise" 

C. W. Smith, in the Messenger of Love, says : "Jesus, 
then, is our example in the true and genuine points, or 
steps of Christian grace, loyalty, and obedience, but 
not in rites, ceremonies, and ordinances. His life 
ceremonially fulfilled the old covenant, and His death 
destroyed it. Our life must fulfill the new. Our ob- 
servation justifies us in stating- that those w T ho are 



80 ABOLISHED RITES. 

most stringent for a literal following- of Jesus ' down 
into and up out of ' the water, and in like shadows, 
are least inclined to follow Him on the line on which 
Peter explicitly declares, that * Christ also suffered for 
us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His 
steps/ What are those steps ? First, ' Who did no 
sin.' Do we follow Him there ? Second, 'Neither 
was guile iound in His mouth. 9 Are we loyal to the 
example in this ? Third, ' Who, when He was reviled, 
reviled not again.' Do we do likewise ? Fourth, 
' When He suffered, He threatened not.' Do our 
lives agree with the pattern ? Fifth, ' But committed 
Himself to Him that judgeth righteously.' — i Pet. 2 : 
21-23. John, Jesus, and the disciples were Jews, 
bound by the Jewish law, and their baptisms were 
simply in compliance with that law, and hence no 
part of the new covenant, and of no binding force 
upon the new covenant children of God." 

John H. Noyes, in The Berean, says : " Matt. 3:11, 
' I [John the Baptist] indeed baptize you with water unto 
repentance : but He that cometh after me is mightier 
than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear : He 
[Christ] shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and 
with fire.' In each of the other Evangelists this dec- 
laration of John is recorded (Mark 1:8; Luke 3:16; 
John 1 '.26) and Christ Himself repeated it just before 
His ascension : * John truly baptized with water ; but 

YE SHALL BE BAPTIZED WITH THE HOLY GHOST not 

many days hence. '—Acts 1:5." 

" Here, then, we have in the beginning of each of 
the first five books of the New Testament an explicit 
statement of ' the doctrine of baptisms ;' the very doc- 
trine, doubtless, to which Paul alluded in using the 
plural of the word baptism. The doctrine manifestly 
is, that water baptism belonged to the ministry of 
John, and the baptism of the Holy Ghost to that of 
Christ. These primary statements are so simple and 
clear that we cannot wonder that Paul regarded ' the 
doctrine of baptism ' as one of the first principles of 



ABOLISHED RITES. 8l 

the instructions of the gospel ; and if on further ex- 
amination we find nothing- inconsistent with the view 
they present, we shall have no difficulty in forming 
our judgment on the subject. " 

"It is plain that all occasions for dispute about the 
mode of water baptism is removed, unless, indeed, we 
consider John the Baptist our spiritual head, instead 
of Christ. If, in professing to be Christians, we rank 
ourselves among the followers of Christ, and not of 
John, we must regard water baptism as an ordinance 
belonging to a past dispensation ; and of course all 
controversy concerning it is ill-timed foolishness. We 
are subjects of the dispensation to which the baptism 
of the Holy Ghost belongs. We receive the substance, 
of which John's baptism was the shadow ; and have no 
more occasion for dispute about water baptism than 
about circumcision or any other ordinance of Judaism." 

Gurtleras says: "Baptism in the Holy Spirit is 
immersion into the pure waters of the Holy Spirit, or 
a rich and abundant communication of His gifts. For 
he on whom the Holy Spirit is poured out, is as it 
were, immersed into Him." 

Hopkins says : "These that are baptized with the 
Spirit, are, as it were, plunged into that heavenly 
flame whose searching energy devours all their dross, 
tin and base alloy/' 

Mrs. Catherine Booth, wife of the founder of the 
Salvation Army, says in her book " Popular Chris- 
tianity" : " What an inveterate tendency there is in the 
human heart to trust in outward forms, instead of 
seeking the inward grace ! And where this is the 
case, what a hindrance, rather than help, have these 
forms proved to the growth, nay, to the very exist- 
ence, of that spiritual life which constitutes the real 
and only force of Christian experience/' 

"When I was in Ireland some of the oldest and 
most experienced Christians who took part in the 



82 ABOLISHED RITES. 

great revival, some twenty-five years ago, told me 
that a great proportion of the results of that wonder- 
ful work of God were lost in consequence of a contro- 
versy about water baptism. Do you wonder that we 
of the Salvation Army shrink from the possibility of 
such a sacrifice of the greater to the less, especially 
when we are backed up by the great apostle to the 
Gentiles thanking God that he baptized none of His 
early converts, and for the very same reason, namely, 
because they were making- the ceremony a cause of 
controversy/ ' 

" When forms are exalted and idolized and trusted 
in * * * they become ' Nehustan,' as a piece of brass, 
or a piece of bread, or a bowl of water. As th* 
apostle said of circumcision, when the Jew had put it 
in the place of righteousness, ' Neither is that circum- 
cision, which is outward in the flesh : * * * Circum- 
cision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the 
letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.' " — 
Rom. 2:28,29. 

" We feel persuaded that if Paul were here, and 
could see the deadly consequences which have arisen 
from the idolatrous regard given to what are called 
the Sacraments of the Supper and of Baptism, he 
would say precisely the same w T ith respect to them, 
Baptism is nothing", and the ceremony of the Lord's 
Supper is nothing-." 

Mrs. Catherine Booth died in 1890. Her last words 
are given as follows : " The waters are rising, but so 
am I. I am not going- under, but over. Do not be 
concerned about dying ; go on living well ; the dying 
will be right.' ' 

Robert Smith, burned in 1555, said to the priest : 
" Show me, are we saved by water or by Christ ? " 
" By both," answered the Catholic. "Then," con- 
tinued the martyr, "the water died for our sins, and 
so must ye say that water hath life." 



ABOLISHED RITES. 83 

A Prussian martyr, one George Wagner, was burned 
at the stake, because, among other things, he ignored 
the belief that water baptism saves. 

To the wife of the Governor of Friesland, the 
martyr Jacques Dosil said : " Water has no power to 
cleanse us from sin." 

A young woman, named Elizabeth, in 1549, when 
asked by her persecutors, " Do you not expect salva- 
tion from baptism ?" replied : " All the water in the 
sea cannot save me ; but salvation is in Christ." She 
had . been a nun, but afterward joined some Protest- 
ants. For her doctrine and constancy she was tortured 
and then drowned. 

A Scottish martyr, one Patrick Hamilton, was 
burned by the Catholics, because, among other things, 
he said. "The corruption of sin remains in children 
after baptism ; a man is not justified by works, but by 
faith only." 

Jeremiah Leslie, in " Christian Baptism" says : 
" The blood of sprinkling, denoted the forgiveness of 
sin or redemption from guilt through the blood of 
Jesus. The baptism of water, shadowed forth the 
washing of regeneration, or the cleansing of man's 
soul from moral pollution by the baptism of the Holy 
Ghost." 

"All these significant signs and ceremonies had 
their completion when Christ Jesus gave up the ghost ; 
for the veil of the temple was rent in twain, which de- 
noted the passing away of all sign and ceremony, and 
the disclosure of the substance in spirit and truth, and 
thus had their fulfilment in the opening of the gospel 
dispensation. The two former particulars, viz., the 
bloody sacrifices and the bloody sprinklings, had their 
fulfilment in the death of Christ on the cross ; and the 
legal purification by water or water-baptism, had its 
fulfilment in the outpouring of the Spirit of God, or 
baptism of the Holy Ghost." 



84 ABOLISHED RITES. 

"The Apostle Paul, in the most unequivocal lan- 
guage, shows that the dispensation of typical ordi- 
nances was done away by the death of Christ, He hav- 
ing- nailed them to His cross, Col. 2:14. If the 
type must go with the antitype in washing us from 
moral pollution, by what rule will you exclude the 
type from going with the antitype in the expiatory 
sacrifice by which we are pardoned? Is it not plain, 
that if water baptism (the symbol of legal purification 
among the Jews,) must go along with the baptism of 
the Holy Ghost to cleanse us from sin, the legal offer- 
ings of the same dispensation must go with the one 
offering of Jesus Christ to save us from guilt? Surely 
if the baptism of the Holy Ghost is insufficient to 
sanctify us without the addition of water baptism, so 
the blood of Jesus must be insufficient for our pardon, 
unless accompanied with the blood of bulls and goats. " 

"To make this matter plain, we observe that the 
addition of water baptism is essential to constitute the 
baptism of the Holy Ghost, the one baptism of the 
gospel, or it is not. If it is, then the baptism of the 
Holy Ghost is not the one baptism of the gospel, 
where the baptism of water is wanting, and of course 
is not of itself a saving ordinance. If it is not, then 
the baptism of the Holy Ghost is the one baptism of 
the gospel, without the addition of water baptism. If 
any should yet be disposed to say that baptism is not 
rightly administered where either part is wanting, and 
therefore of no efficacy, do they not make water bap- 
tism essential to salvation? " 

" One more consideration puts this part of our sub- 
ject to rest. The baptism of the Holy Ghost consigns 
all its subjects to one body, ' for by one Spirit are we 
all baptized into one body. 9 (1 Cor. 12:13.) Not so 
with water baptism, that divides its subjects into as 
many bodies as there are different sects in Christen- 
dom who use it. Is that any part of the one baptism 
of Christ that thus divides the body? 'Is Christ 
divided?' 1 Cor. 1:13." 



ABOLISHED RITES. 85 

V. S. Miller, in " Denominations of the World'' pub- 
lishes this : " There are two ceremonies in use among 
most professors of the Christian name — water baptism, 
and what is termed the Lord's Supper. The first of 
these is generally esteemed the essential means of initi- 
ation into the Church of Christ, and the latter of 
maintaining- communion with Him. But as we have 
been convinced that nothing* short of His redeeming 
power, invariably revealed, can set the soul free from 
the thraldom of sin, by this power alone we believe 
salvation to be effected. We hold that as there is one 
Lord and one faith (Eph. 4:5), so His baptism is one 
in nature and operation ; that nothing* short of it can 
make us living members of His mystical body, and 
that the baptism with water, administered by His fore- 
runner, John, belonged, as the latter confessed, to an 
inferior dispensation. John 3:30." 

Robert Barclay, Quaker Reformer, (died 1690) 
says : " If water baptism was once a carnal ordinance, 
as the Apostle affirms it to have been (Heb. 9:10), it 
remains a carnal ordinance still, and if a carnal ordi- 
nance, then no necessary part of the gospel or new 
covenant dispensation ; and if no necessary part of it, 
then not needful to continue, nor to be practiced by 
such as live and walk under this dispensation. There 
were some in the darkest times of popery who testified 
against water baptism. For one Alanus speaks of 
some in his time that were burnt for denying it : for 
they said that baptism had no efficacy, either in chil- 
dren or adult persons/' 

" John's baptism was a figure, and the figure gives 
way to the substance ; the thing figured remains — to 
wit, the ' one baptism ' of Christ, while the other, the 
baptism of John, ceaseth. That the baptism of John 
is ceased, many of our adversaries confess ; and if 
water-baptism had been to continue a perpetual ordi- 
nance of Christ, He would either have practised it 
Himself, or commanded His apostles so to do. In 
John 4:2, it is declared that Christ did not practice it 



86 ABOLISHED RITES. 

Himself, and nowhere has He commanded His dis- 
ciples to practice it." 

"And to make water-baptism a necessary institu- 
tion of the Christian religion, which is pure and 
spiritual, and not carnal and ceremonial, is to dero- 
gate from the new covenant dispensation, and set up 
the legal rites and ceremonies of which this of bap- 
tism, or washing- with water, was one, as appears from 
Heb. 9:10, where ' divers baptisms' are ranked with 
the * carnal ordinances ' — for how baptism with water 
comes now to be a spiritual ordinance more than be- 
fore, in the time of the law, doth not appear, seeing- it 
is but water still." 

" There is but one baptism, as well as but one Lord, 
one faith. This one baptism, which is the baptism of 
Christ, is not a washing- with or dipping in water, but 
a being baptized by the Spirit. The baptism of John 
was but a figure of this, and, therefore, as the figure, 
to give place to the substance. That there is but one 
baptism there needs no other proof than the words of 
the text Eph. 4:5, ' one Lord, one faith, ONE BAP- 
TISM/ There is no baptism to continue now but the 
one baptism of Christ. Therefore water baptism is 
not to continue now because it is not the one baptism 
of Christ. If water baptism had been to continue a 
perpetual ordinance of Christ in His Church, He 
would either have practiced it Himself or commanded 
His apostles so to do. But that He preached it not 
the Scripture plainly affirms, John 4:2 ; and that He 
commanded His disciples to baptize with water, I 
could never read. If water baptism had been an or- 
dinance of the gospel, then Paul would have been sent 
to administer it; but he declares positively, 1 Cor. 1:17, 
' Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel/ " 

Joseph Phipps, in " True Christian Baptism and 
Communion" says : " Spirit baptism is not connected 
with water baptism, nor at all dependent upon it. 
The baptism of the Saviour is complete in itself, with- 
out exterior form and shadow." 






ABOLISHED RIT. 8j 

"Those who advocate the continuance of water 
baptism plead our Saviour's commission, Matt. 28:19 ; 
but He here makes no mention of water, nor do His 
words imply it ; for His expressions are such as suit 
only His own spiritual baptism. The rituals of the 
[Mosaic law were once of divine institution, but being" 
only shadows of good thing's to come in the spiritual 
dispensation of the gospel, the good things themselves 
being - come, their shadows appear to us no longer ob- 
the extended forms of water baptism and 
the Supper being shadows of the good things already 
come under the spiritual ministration of the Saviour, 
are superseded thereby, and become of no more force 
than past rudiments of the law." 

Enoch Lewis, in " True Christian Baptism ," says : 
"Water baptism being an outward rite, and at best 
but a type of an inward and spiritual work, would 
seem in its very nature more properly to belong to 
the dispensation of the law, than to that of the gospel. 
It is in strict conformity with the 'divers washings' 
and purifications we read of in the ritual of Moses, 
and appears to have been administered subsequently 
to all who were received as proselytes into the He- 
brew Church. From the Babylonish Talmud, and 
from the works of Maimonides and other Jewish 
writers, we learn that circumcision, baptism, and 
sacrifice, were enjoined on every male convert to the 
Jewish faith, and baptism and sacrifice on every 
female. The baptism, as described by these authors, 
appears to have been very similar in irs mode of ad- 
ministration to that practiced by John and the early 
teachers of Christianity, who were yet in bondage to 
Jewish rites and ceremonies." 

"John, who came to prepare the Jews for the re- 
ception of the Messiah, administered water baptism as 
a symbol of the purification of heart which was neces- 
sary for each one to experience in the dispensation 
which was then at hand." 

" The entire agreement of this rite with the spirit of 



88 ABOLISHED RITES. 

the Mosaic institutions, justified the Jews in their use 
of it : and John the Baptist was explicitly directed to 
administer it ; but this furnishes no reason for us to 
believe it was ever made part of the gospel. As a 
relic of outward rites, it was not in harmony with a 
spiritual dispensation.' ' 

''John had a clear perception of the difference be- 
tween the baptism which belonged to the gospel dis- 
pensation, and that which he was sent to administer. 
The testimony which he bore to the spiritual character 
of the baptism of Christ, as contrasted with his own, 
is thus recorded by the Evangelists :" 

' / indeed baptize you with water unto repentance : 
but He that cometh after me is mightier than I, 
whose shoes I am not worthy to bear : He shall bap- 
tize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire/ ' (Matt. 

3:ii;) 

I i?zdeed have baptized you with water : but He 

SHALL BAPTIZE YOU WITH THE HOLY GHOST.' " (Mark 

1:8.) 

John answered, saying unto them all, I indeed bap- 
tize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, 
the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to un- 
loose : He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and 
with fire.' " (Luke 3:16.) 

And I knew Him not : but He that sent me to 
baptize with w T ater, the same said unto me, Upon 
whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and re- 
maining on Him, the same is He which baptizeth with 
the Holy Ghost:" (John 1:33.) 

" These declarations of John are very emphatic, and 
bear a strong testimony to the nature of the baptism 
referred to in the command of our Saviour to His dis- 
ciples. The discourse is narrated by all the Evangel- 
ists/' 

James H. Moon, in " Water Baptism" says : "To 
whom can we turn with more confidence for knowl- 
edge about all baptism, ordained or intended for us, 
than unto John the Baptist whom we are told was 






ABOLISHED RITES. 89 

sent to administer one baptism, and unto Christ who 
was the author of another baptism? John says his 
baptism is of water, thus distinguishing* it from Christ's 
baptism without water. They are both quoted as 
testifying to two dissimilar and distinct baptisms, ad- 
ministered at different times, one with w r ater and the 
other without ; neither of them intimates that these 
two baptisms shall ever be united, but they do both 
plainly intimate that they shall not be united, and that 
the first shall pass away, and the second remain. " 

" If in these gospel days we were to have been bap- 
tized in water, would not Joel have prophesied of 
water, as well as of Spirit? Would not our Saviour 
at some time have intimated that water baptism should 
be continued, and have given some instructions about 
it? And would He not have baptized His apostles in 
this way? Jesus exclaimed upon the cross: ' It is 
finished, 9 and the law and the prophets were ful- 
filled. Christ blotted out ordinances, and nailed 
them to His cross. He made no reservation of 
water baptism. It went with the rest." 

Charles Spurgeon, the noted Baptist clergyman, 
said in a sermon : Cleanse your hands, ye sinners ; 
and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. ' This 
makes our holy religion such a weighty and solemn 
business. If it were wholly a matter of outward or- 
dinances, we might take the child and sprinkle it, or 
might bring the adult and plunge him, or we might 
admit all to a table where they should eat and drink 
such consecrated materials as should save them. This 
would be all easy enough, and hence men cling to a 
religion of ceremonies ; for heart-religion is trouble- 
some, and the ungodly cannot endure it. Ritualism 
is the most popular religion in the world." 

George Fox, Quaker Reformer, (died 1690) says in 
his "Journal:'" " He (Paul) asserted in the church 
the one faith which Christ was the author of, and one 
baptism, which was of the Spirit into the one body, 



gO ABOLISHED RITES. 

and one Lord Jesus Christ, who was the spiritual bap- 
tizer, who John said should come after him. The 
Jews did use to take a cup, and to break bread and 
divide it among- them in these feasts, as may be seen 
in the Jewish Antiquities ; so the breaking- of bread 
and drinking of wine were Jewish rites which were 
not to last always. They did also baptize with water, 
which made it not seem a strange thing to them, when 
John the Baptist came with his decreasing ministra- 
tion of water baptism. But as to the bread and wine, 
after the disciples had taken it, some of them ques- 
tioned whether Jesus was the Christ. For some of 
them said, after He was crucified, " We trusted that it 
had been He which should have redeemed Israel." 
(Luke 24:21.) And though the Corinthians had the 
bread and wine, and were baptized in water, the 
apostle told them they were reprobates if Christ were 
not in them, and bid them examine themselves. 
Christ had said before that He was the Bread of Life 
which came down from Heaven, and that He would 
come and dwell in them, which the apostles did wit- 
ness fulfilled and exhorted others to seek for that 
which comes down from above. But the outward 
bread and wine and water are not from above but 
from below. Eat the Bread which comes down from 
above, which is not outward bread, and drink the cup 
of salvation which He gives in His kingdom, which is 
not outward wine. And thus there will not be a 
looking- at the things that are seen (as outward bread 
and wine and water are) for, as says the apostle, " The 
things which are seen are temporal ; but the things 
which are not seen are eternal.' (2 Cor. 4:18.) Out- 
ward bread and wine and water are from below and 
are visible and temporal. So the fellowship that 
stands in the use of bread, wine, and water, circum- 
cision, outward temple, and things seen will have an 
end, but the fellowship which stands in the gospel, the 
power of God and which brings life and immortality 
to light, is eternal and will stand. The apostle told 
the Corinthians who were in disorder about water, 



ABOLISHED RITES. gi 

bread, and wine, that he desired to know nothing 
amongst them but Jesus Christ and Him crucified." 

Dr. E. Griffin, a minister of the Campbellite de- 
nomination, a sect that places much stress on water 
baptism, says: ''Others taking* the opposite ground, 
make baptism almost everything. It is baptism, 
baptism, baptism, from the first of January to the last 
of December. Without baptism there can be, with 
them, no pardon, no peace, no happiness, no hope, no 
salvation, none of those blessings, in a word, which 
Christ came to bestow upon His followers. The un- 
baptized, which with them means the unimmersed, 
however ardent their piety, however unblamable their 
lives, however lovely their character, they are all 
represented as being without God, without Christ, and 
without hope in the world. They are regarded as 
being in a state of sin and condemnation, as strangers 
to the covenants of promise, and aliens to the com- 
monwealth of Israel. And as long as baptism is 
placed on a par, or exalted above the spirit of love, 
and of good works, we shall minister the gentle hint 
that it is worthless/ ' 

The dying words of Joseph Briggins, (A. D. 1675) 
is recorded as follows : ' There are many ways and 
baptisms in the world ; but O, Thou pure holy, holy 
One, we have known Thy spiritual baptism into 
Christ Jesus our Lord, by whom the living water we 
have known and felt. O ! it is exceedingly pure, by 
which we have been washed from all our sins." 

The last words of Hayes Hamilton, (A. D. 1697) 
are given thus : " Them that will be satisfied with that 
of water, let them hold it, for my part I depend noth- 
ing upon it ; I depend only upon the baptism of the 
Spirit. Heaven is not far from me. It is a sweet 
change." 

Samuel M'All says that : " John Clayton being told 



g2 ABOLISHED RITES. 

by a young- man, in a rather off-hand way, that he 
was about to join the Baptist denomination, because 
half an hour's examination of the New Testament was 
enough to make any one a Baptist, quietly answered 
that perhaps such might be the result of half an hour 9 s 
examination ; but that a little further thought and in- 
quiry would at least discover that all the proofs and 
reasons were not on one side of the question/ ' 

CITATIONS FROM VARIOUS AUTHORS. 

" The spiritual baptism is that wherewith Christ 
daily baptizeth all who willingly receive Him." — 
Piscator. 

" That which regenerates and renews the hearts of 
the elect. " — Chrysostom. 

"That which washeth the soul -as water doth the 
body." — Calvin. 

" That which purgeth our consciences." — Peters. 

"That which kindles zeal in our hearts." — Phillips. 

" That which is necessary to salvation." — Fulk. 

" That which purges our lusts and corruptions." — 
Pool. 

" That which consumes the dross." — Henry. 

" The only necessary baptism." — Walter Brute. 

"Wherewith Christ baptizeth all that come to 
Him." — Taylor. 

" Makes partakers of the adoption of the sons of 
God." — Stevens. 

" That which only saves." — Burkitt. 

" Without it there is neither right nor title to the 
kingdom of God." — Clarke. 

" The burial with Christ, the resurrection with 
Christ, the union with Christ." — Robert McNair. 



ABOLISHED RITES. 93 

" Christians are ' sealed/ not with outward cere- 
monies, but with the Holy Spirit of promise." — 
John Alle?i. 

"The baptism of John was seen; the baptism of 
Christ is invisible." — Origen. 

" Neither hath Christ desisted from baptizing- : He 
ever yet practiseth it, not by the ministry of the body, 
but by the invisible operation of His power." — 
Augustine. 

" If any man hath only received the bodily wash- 
ing- with water, that is outwardly seen with the eye, 
he hath not put on the Lord Jesus Christ." — Hieroyn. 

11 But whilst I say, let the Bible answer, I say also, 
we are not to insult the Bible and common sense, 
and to degrade the Christian religion from the glory 
of its spirituality to the vileness of materialism, by 
doubting- for an instant what answer the Bible will 
give to the question — we take it for granted that the 
Bible will be found to ascribe no power to water to 
cleanse the soul." — Gerrit Smith. 

" He (Christ) calls His death a baptism, as being- a 
purging of us all/' — Theophylait. 

" The Saviour calls martydom baptism, saying. 
1 Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of, and be bap- 
tized with the baptism that I am baptized with ?" — 
Cyril. 

"There are some who, in striving for piety, have 
undergone death for Christ, in reality not in sem- 
blance, needing, for salvation, nothing of the water 
symbols, being baptized by their own blood." — Basil 
{died 379). 

" But without being born again by baptism through 
the Spirit of God, and sealed by sanctification and 
made His temple, no one can partake of the heavenly 
blessings, although his life should be found in other 
respects blameless." — Didymus of Alexandria. 



g4 . ABOLISHED RITES. 

" Be pure, not by washing, but by thinking." — 
Clemens, {died 220? ) . 

" We are renewed by the regeneration of washing — 
we are renewed by the effusion of the Holy Spirit.' ' — 
Ambrose, {died 397) • 

INFANT BAPTISM. 

Were it not that infant sprinkling is a subject which 
often perplexes well-meaning people, we would not 
give it even a passing notice, for there is no command 
in the New Testament to baptize an infant. There is 
no such thing mentioned in the New Testament AS an in- 
fant ever having been baptized. It is true that 
while the legal ceremony of water baptism was enjoined 
upon believers, "households" were baptized, as in 
the case of the jailer and his house, Acts 16:33, and 
Lydia and her house, Acts 16:15, hut nothing is said 
about infants being included. Nothing is said indi- 
cating that there were infants in the household. Even 
if the rite of baptism had been administered to infants 
in the above instances, it would have been before the 
time of reformation. Heb. 9:10, and so not binding 
now. That infants, however, were baptized by the 
Jews is evident from testimony that follows : 

Moses Maimonides, a Jewish Rabbi and writer of 
the 12th Century, says: "An Israelite that takes a 
little heathen child (in war) or that finds an heathen 
infant and baptizes him for a proselyte, behold, he 
is a proselyte." 

Wall says : " If any proselyte who came over to the 
Jewish religion and was baptized in it, had any infant 
children, they also, at their father's request, were cir- 
cumcised and baptized, and admitted as proselytes." 

The Gemara (the Jewish Commentary) says : " Be- 
cause none is made a proselyte until circumcision and 
baptism, and if the father be dead, at the request of the 



ABOLISHED RITES. 95 

council which consists of three men that have care of 
this baptism, according- to the law, and the baptism 
of proselytes." 

Dr. Lightfoot says: "The practice of baptizing 
infants was a thing as well known in the Church of the 
Jews as ever it has been in the Christian Church." 

Because he rejected infant baptism, with other rites, 
Arnold w r as crucified, burned, and his ashes thrown 
into the Tiber, in 1155. 

Robinson well says: "Let any man of common 
understanding- lift his mind to the dignity and majesty 
of the infinitely wise and good God, and the?i imag- 
ine whether it be possible that the moral g-overnment of 
His empire can depend upon the application of a 

WET SPONGE, A MOIST HAND, OR A FEW DROPS OF 
WATER APPLIED BY ONE FRAIL MORTAL TO THE FORE- 
HEAD OF ANOTHER I" 

" If anything- good in the world depe?ids tipo?i a cere- 
mony so trifling, and so capricious (z. e., as infant 
baptism), the Supreme wisdom, justice and goodness is 
not what pious men have been used to take it for ! " 

Dr. G. A. Jacobs, an eminent clergymen of the 
Church of England, in his " Christian Baptism," 
says : " Infant baptism finds no mention in the New 
Testament. Notwithstanding- all that has been written 
by learned men on this subject, it remains indisputable 
that infant baptism is not mentioned at all in the New 
Testament. No instance of it is recorded there ; no 
allusion is made to its effects ; no directions are given 
for its administration. It ought to be distinctly 
acknowledged that it is not an apostolic ordinance. 
There is no trace of it until the last part of the second 
century, when a passage is found in Irenaeus which 
may possibly — and only possibly — refer to it. . Nor is 
it anywhere distinctly mentioned before the time of 
Tertullian, who, while he testified to the practice, was 



96 ABOLISHED RITES. 

himself rather opposed to it. As an established order 
of the church, it belongs to the Third Century, when 
its use and the mode of its administration, and the 
whole theory of it as a Christian ceremony, were 
necessarily moulded by the baptismal theory of the 
time — a circumstance which ought to be distinctly 
kept in view in every consideration of the subject. " 

As before stated, as early as the Second Century, 
even so early as A. D. 140, 150, 175, the Christian 
Church, as history shows began to lapse back into 
some of the old Jewish customs, and later on the 
budding* of Catholicism came to the front and then 
rapidly the Church developed into Popery. And then 
by the latter corrupt system, rites and ceremonies were 
greatly magnified and multiplied, arid to this day the 
professing church still- clings to some of them. 
Among these Jewish ceremonies that the Early Church 
took up and carried along was infant baptism. 

The willingness with which some of the early Chris- 
tians drifted back into Judaism, and the extent to 
which they carried it, is astonishing. About A. D. 
200, as history shows, Irenseus adopted infant bap- 
tism from the Jews. Neander, the great German 
ecclesiastical historian, asserts that Cyprian (died A. 
D. 258) hastened water baptism to the moment of 
birth lest the infant die unbaptized and be lost. Others 
taught that baptism would be administered in Hades 
to subjects not baptized before death. Others still 
taught that the rite could be administered before 
birth (see Robinson). Tertullian (died between 
A. D. 220 and 240) declared that infants being as un- 
clean as any, needed baptism as much as any (see 
Kendrick) . Clement ( A. D. 200) agrees with Hermas 
that the apostles performed in Hades the rite of bap- 
tism on the pious souls of the Old Testament (see 
Neander). 

These were some of the beliefs that crept into the 
Early Church as the observance of rites and ceremonies 
was borrowed from Jewry, yet, then as now, there 



ABOLISHED RITES. 97 

were some who ignored these outward carnal cere- 
monies, and strove to worship God in spirit and in 
truth. 

Those early leaders who brought the rites and cere- 
monies of Jewry into the Christian Church, and 
sowed the seed of Popery, or who paved the way for 
Catholicism, did not carry with them all of the Church. 
Here and there, as now, were some who would not be 
bewildered by the carnality and superstition of the 
former. From the Fourth to the Sixteenth Century 
infant baptism was practiced generally by those who 
adhered to rites and ceremonies and after the bringing 
of Judaism into the Early Church the whole system of 
the Papacy, with its idolatrous train of rituals sprang 
into existence. 

It is often claimed that infant baptism takes the 
place of circumcision, yet the Bible makes no such 
assertion, neither does it intimate it in the most re- 
mote way. Circumcision was a rite of the law to 
which males were subject but infant sprinklers apply 
the water to both male and female infants. Infant 
baptism really becomes dangerous when people de- 
pend for salvation upon the fact that water was 
sprinkled upon them in their childhood. 

Dr. Robinson, the Baptist historian, says : " Chil- 
dren were so absolutely necessary to ecclesiastics that 
they were obliged to have them at all adventures. 
With an imperial child ecclesiastics subdued cities ; 
with noble children monks built and endowed monas- 
teries ; with poor children, as Basil observes, the 
clergy formed choirs ; and in fine, of children necessity 
compelled them to form the whole Catholic Church. 
How essential, then, to their schemes to fill the world 
with exclamations of ' Suffer little children to come 
unto me ' (to us) ! The first European rule of infant 
baptism was made at an irregular meeting of seven 
obscure men (of a province in Spain), without a 
knowledge of neighboring bishops, in the year 517. 
They were a low, illiterate, mongrel sort of African 



98 ABOLISHED RITES. 

Jewish Christians. Their Judaism appears in the 
above council by its canons, in which they regulated 
the feasts of the Passover and Pentecost, and the keep- 
ing- of the (Jewish) Sabbath, and called the bishop of 
Carthage pope [/. e. y high priest]." 

Irenseus (Greek bishop died about A. D. 200) says : 
" Infant baptism appears as the medium through 
which Christ imparts sanctification to infants. " 

This error of the early bishop is well refuted by 
Olshausen, who says : "Of infant baptism the New 
Testament knows nothing.' ' 

Bossuet, the learned French Catholic bishop, (died 
1704) says: "Protestants assert that the baptism of 
infants is founded on the Scripture, but they produce 
no express passage to that purpose, arguing from re- 
mote, not to say doubtful, or even false premises. It 
is certain that all the proofs brought from the Scrip- 
ture on this subject have no force at all." 

Bellarmine, a Catholic, in his work on baptism, 
says that in Scripture: "There is neither command 
nor example for infant baptism." 

John Wickliffe, the English Reformer and trans- 
lator of the Bible (died 1384), says: "They who 
affirm that the children of the faithful dying without 
baptism are not saved, are blasphemous and foolish." 

William Tyndale, English Reformer and martyr 
(died 1536), says: "The water of the (baptismal) 
font hath no more virtue in it than any other water — 
that the water of baptism doth not take away sin. 
The virtue of baptism lieth not in hallowed water, or 
in the outward things at the font, but in faith only. 
Infants are holy and clean, though they have not 

RECEIVED BAPTISM," 



ABOLISHED RITES. 99 

Dr. David Simpson, the eminent Episcopal minister, 
in his work "A Plea for Religion" written in 1797, 
says : " I add a second circumstance which seems a 
hardship to the enlightened and conscientious part of 
the clergy. When we baptize children, we thank God 
' that it hath pleased Him to regenerate them with the 
Holy Spirit.' When the same children are presented 
to the Bishop, he addresses the Divine Being as hav- 
ing ' vouchsafed to regenerate them by water and the 
Holy Ghost/ while many of them are as wild young 
rogues as ever existed. Then when we come to bury 
them, we dare do no other than send them all to 
Heaven, though many of those we commit to the 
earth have been as wicked in life as men well can be 
this side of Hell. What I mean to infer is, that if the 
doctrine of baptismal regeneration and final persever- 
ance be true, every member of the Church of England 
is as sure of Heaven as if he were already there. I 
leave those whom it may concern to draw the natural 
inference.' ' 

But let us hear another Episcopal testimony. Dr. 
George Hodges, D. D., Dean of the Episcopal Theo- 
logical School, Cambridge, Mass., in a work entitled, 

The Episcopal Church" says on page 81 : " Con- 
cerning infant baptism there is neither precept nor ex- 
ample in the Xew Testament." 

The third and last ordinance to be considered is 
what is generally termed the Lord 's Supper. 



THE LORD'S SUPPER. 



It is said that " Custom makes everything* proper/' 
While that may be true in * a measure, in worldly 
things, it is, indeed, very far from being a safe rule to 
apply in spiritual thing's. 

Christians often speak of the Lord's Supper. If 
asked for an explanation, many will respond, in sub- 
stance, about as follows : " Why, on the eve before 
the crucifixion, Jesus took bread and wine with His 
disciples and instituted the Lord's Supper, a memorial 
feast, which He declared should be kept up by us until 
His return for the Church/' 

While this is the conscientious view held by many 
of the Lord's children, let us see 'whether the Scrip- 
tures of divine truth substantiate the claim. 

The term, the Lord's Supper, is only once men- 
tioned in the Bible. " When ye come together 
therefore into one place, this is not to eat the 
Lord's Supper." — i Cor. 11:20. It is singular, in- 
deed, that so much stress is laid upon an expression 
only once used in the Scripture, and then referred to 
in a rebuke. 

Jesus never made use of the term the Lord's Supper; 
at least we have no record of it. How could He in- 
stitute a feast to be called the Lord's Supper without 
mentioning it ? 

In Luke, 22d Chap., is an account of the Last 
Supper. Here we find that Jesus was not celebrating" 
or instituting an ordinance called the Lord 's Supper; 
but He was observing the Jewish Passover, for 
which the passover (lamb), on the very occasion of 
the Last Supper partaken of by Jesus and His dis- 
ciples "must be killed'' See Luke 22:7-13. Mark 
14:12, says ; " When they killed the passover/* This 
(100) 



ABOLISHED RITES. IOI 

makes it very plain that the ceremony was the old 
Jewish Passover, in which the lamb previously slain 
was utilized in the observance of the ceremony. 

Jesus was a Jew on His human side, and was circum- 
cised like Jewish children in general, see Luke 2:21. 
Later on He was baptized under the law with water 
baptism in order to fulfil the righteousness of the law. 
See Matt. 3:15. Prior to His crucifixion He zealously 
kept the law, and that identical law, too, which later 
on His very sacrifice on Calvary virtually blotted out. 
Mark the Scripture proof of the fact that Christ by His 
work on the cross blotted out ordinances: Christ is 
the end of the law for righteousness to every one that 
believeth." — Rom. 10:4. 

" Having- abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the 
law of commandments co?itained i?i ordinances'' — 
Eph. 2:15. 

" Which stood only in meats and dri?iks, and divers 
washings (Greek and German, baptisms), and carnal 
ordinances , imposed on them until the time of re- 
formation." — Heb. 9:10. 

"Blotting out the handwriting of ordina?ices that 
w r as against us, which was contrary to us, and took 
it out of the way , NAILING IT TO HIS CROSS." 
— Col. 2:14. 

"Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the 
rudiments of the world, WHY, as though living in 
the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (TOUCH 
NOT; TASTE NOT; HANDLE NOT; Which all 
are to perish with the using;) after the command- 
ments AND DOCTRINES OF MEN?" — Col. 2:20,21,22. 

Could language be plainer ? Could any statement 
more emphatically declare ordinances to be abolished ? 
Could any command more fully charge us to neither 
" touch,' "taste," nor " HANDLE " them ? 

This last feast which He observed with His disciples 
on the night of His betrayal He Himself always called 
the Passover. In the face of this undeniable fact, how 
can we say that He called it the Lord 's Supper, or that 
He instituted a new feast to be so named ? 



102 ABOLISHED RITES. 

This Mosaic observance is not once called the Lord' s 
Supper in that chapter, but six times is it called the 
PASSOVER, an ordinance instituted by God Him- 
self, according- to Biblical chronology, 1491 years be- 
fore Christ's appearance as the world's Redeemer. 
See Exodus 12:1-27,42-48. Concerning this feast 
Jesus said to His disciples on that dark and sorrowful 
night, " With desire I have desired to eat this Passover 
(not Lord's Supper) with you before I suffer." — Luke 
22:15. In the next verse He says, " I will not any 
more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom 
of God." Surely there will be no literal eating and 
drinking in the kingdom of God, whether we interpret 
that to mean in the spiritual dispensation here now on 
earth, or in Heaven hereafter. 

In the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and 
John, the event of Christ and His disciples observing 
this same feast is described in nearly the same lan- 
guage, and not once is it called The Lord's Supper, 
but sixteen times is it plainly called THE PASS- 
OVER. Moreover, nothing ' is said about another 
supper, much less is a single word mentioned about 
Christ's instituting a new ordinance. 

The religion of God's ancient people (the Jews) 
consisted of a routine of forms and ceremonies. The 
most important was the Passover, consisting of the 
Paschal lamb, with unleavened bread, bitter herbs, and 
the wine. 

The following is taken from Smith's Illustrated His- 
tory of the Bible, and was for that work manifestly 
gleaned from the Hebrew writers, evidently from The 
Talmud. This consists of two parts, the Mishna or 
text, being a collection of Jewish traditions and ex- 
planations of Scripture, and the Gemara, or commen- 
tary. Sometimes the name Talmud is restricted, 
especially by the Jewish writers, to the Gemara, or 
commentary. The Jews claim that these traditions 
were handed down from one generation to another 
until the Second Christian Century, when they were 
reduced to writing by Rabbi Jehuda, and he is recog- 






z. i:f Mir 7:715 : : 5 

nized as the collector of the existing Miskma. Of the 
Gemara or comments on the J/ssAma. there are two, 
one known as the Palestinian, commonly called the 
Jerusalem Talmud (3d and 5th centuries) , prepared by 

:;:e Ra:"::? ;: 7::^::^. :,:.:. :;;e :::y*.::.:::; Zi.:z..:i 
(5th century). Both contain the same Jfiskma or text, 
but different Gemaras, or commentaries. The Baby- 
lonian Talmud is about three times as large as the 
other, and is more highly esteemed by the Je 

Then came the day of unleavened bread, when, 
the Passover must be killed? (Luke 22:7.) The exact 
time appointed in the law for killing the Paschal lamb 
was on the 14th of Nisan (April 5), about sunset. 
As all leaven was scrupulously removed about noon 
cm the 14th in preparation for the feast, it was not un- 
natural to call this ' the day* or as Matthew and Mark 
have it, *Tke first day at unleavened tread.' " 

" The head of the household, or ' celebrant/ began 
by a form of blessing ' for the day and for the wine,' 
pronounced over a cup, of which he and the others 
then drank. All who were present then washed their 
hands, this also having a special benediction. The 
table was then set out with the Paschal lamb, un- 
leavened bread, bitter herbs, and the dish known as 
Gharoseth, a sauce made of dates, figs, raisins and 
vir.e^ar ar. i cef:£r-.ri :;■ crnrr.e::: :ra:e ::.e r. n:_~ :: 
:::eir : :::i.i^e in -^y;:. . rt re'.erra.::: r_rs:. a.:;i :.~:\ 
:he ::;.e:?. c:::-e:a:-:n::r. ::' ::.e ::::e: herrs :::: 
the Gharoseth and ate them/* 

"The dishes were then removed, and a cup of wine 
again brought. Then followed an interval which was 
a'.'.: "■■:: :he-:re::c.il*y f;r :::e ;-.:e?:.::::s :::a: ::\.^..: :e 
askei :y :'_-.:!. ire:: ;r ?:: se'; :es. v.-'.-.;. - ere as:::v.5he i 
at such a strange beginning of a feast, and the cup 
was passed around and drank at the close of it. The 
::f;:es :e:::,~ rr :::£■::: : :: a^ra::: :i.e :eie:ran: :-r;e:i:7 i 
the commemorative words which opened what was 
strictly the Paschal Supper, and pronounced a solemn 
thanksgiving, followed by Psalms 113,114. Then 



104 ABOLISHED RITES. 

came a second washing- of the hands, with a short form 
of blessing- as before, and the celebrant broke one of 
the two loaves or cakes of unleavened bread and gave 
thanks over it." 

"All then took portions of the bread and dipped 
them, together with the bitter herbs, into the Charo- 
seth and so ate them. After this they ate the flesh of 
the Paschal lamb, with bread, etc., as they liked ; and 
after another blessing, a third cup, known especially 
as the * cup of blessing/ was handed around. This 
was succeeded by a fourth cup, and the recital of 
Psalms 115,118, followed by a prayer, and this was 
accordingly known as the cup of the Hallel, or of the 
Song." 

Concerning* the cups of wine used at the Passover, 
Smith 9 s Illustrated History of the Bible " says : " The 
Mishna strictly enjoins that there should never be less 
than four cups of it provided at the Paschal meal, even 
of the poorest Israelite. Two of them appear to be 
distinctly mentioned, in Luke 22:17,20. The cup of 
blessing was probably the latter one of these, and is 
generally considered to be the third of the series.' ' 

In regard to the singing at the Passover, "Smith's 
Illustrated History of the Bible" says : " The first por- 
tion, comprising Psalms 113 and 114, was sung in the 
early part of the meal, and the second part after the 
fourth cup of wine. This is supposed to have been 
the hymn sung by our Lord and His apostles." 

Jesus said : " The true worshippers shall worship 
the Father in spirit and in truth : for the 
Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a 
Spirit : and they that worship Him must worship 
Him in spirit and in truth." — John 4:23,24. 

In the sixth chapter of John Jesus declares : 32. 
" Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not 
that bread from Heaven ; but my Father giveth you the 
true bread from Heaven." 



ABOLISHED RITES. IO5 

33. "For the bread of God is He which cometh 
down from Heaven, and giveth life unto the world." 

35. " I am the bread of life : he that cometh to me 
shall never hunger; and he that believeth on vie 

SHALL NEVER THIRST." 

47. " Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that be- 
lieveth on me hath everlasting - life." 

48. ' / am that bread of life" 

50,51. " This is the bread which cometh down from 
Heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I 
am the living- bread which came down from Heaven : 
if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever." 

57. " As the living- Father hath sent me, and I live 
by the Father : so he that eateth vie [by faith] , even he 
shall live by me" 

63. "it is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh 
profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto 
you, they are spirit, and they are life." 

Carefully read the sixth chapter of John from the 
27th verse to the 67th ; also the second chapter of 
Colossians, from the sixth verse to the 23d. 

But we return to the narrative given in Luke 22 of 
the celebration by Jesus of the last supper with His 
disciples. Let us observe whether Luke calls it The 
Lord's Supper, or something- else. 

I. " Now the feast of unleavened bread drew nigh, 
which is called The Passover." 

7,8. " Then came the day of unleavened bread, when 
the passover [the lamb] must be killed. And He 
sent Peter and John, saying, Go and prepare us the 
Passover, that we may eat." 

II. "And ye shall say unto the goodman of the 
house, The Master saith unto thee, Where is the guest- 
chamber, where I shall eat the Passover with my dis- 
ciples ? " 

13. "And they went, and found as He had said 
unto them : and they made ready the Passover." 

15. "And He said unto them, With desire I have 
desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." 

Thus it is plain beyond the possibility of a doubt 



106 ABOLISHED RITES. 

that this observance was nothing- more than the Jewish 
Passover, The Lord calls it nothing else, and says 
not a word about another or a new feast to be called 
The Lord's Supper. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John 
all testify to the same fact in similar language. 

In verse 16, addressing His Jewish disciples, He 
says unto them : " I will not any more eat thereof, 
until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God." 

17. "And He took the cup, and gave thanks, and 
said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves." 

18-20. " For I say unto you, I will not drink of the 
fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. 
And He took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, 
and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which 
is given for you : this do in remembrance of me. 
Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup 
is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for 
you." _ 

"This do in remembrance of me." How natural 
and fitting. The Passover had a two-fold symbolical 
meaning to the Jews. It pointed back to the deliver- 
ance from Egyptian bondage, and forward to Christ, 
the coming Messiah. How appropriate that now 
upon the occasion of this last observance of the Pass- 
over Supper with the disciples (His Jewish brethren) 
He should say unto them concerning this typical feast 
which pointed to Him, "This do in remembrance of 
me." No command is here given, nor yoke made, to 
be incumbent upon the Church in the future to keep 
up this or any other literal supper of bread and wine 
in the new dispensation. The Master did not com- 
mand, nor even intimate, that the perpetuity of the 
rite should be continued through all future genera- 
tions, or until His final coming for the Church, His 
Bride, when the dead shall be raised, and when the 
Saints who are alive and remain shall be caught up to- 
gether with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in 
the air and so ever be with the Lord, as recorded in 
1 Thess. 4:16,17. Yet from this account of the Pass- 
over our ordinance brethren draw the inference that 



ABOLISHED RIT IOJ 

then and there Christ instituted a new feast, separate 
from the Pa^ be called The Lord's Supper; but 

does the language of the text declare it ? 

It must be observed that Christ and His disciples 
celebrated this feast still under the law, for He 
had not yet abolished the system of types by His s 
rifice on the cross, much less had this abolishment 
actually passed into effect by the declaration of the 
e of Rei . Heb. 9:10, u :■/; hole code 

of rituals was to give way to a new and spiritual 

WORSHIP. 

Like His d in John 6:60, some people may 

be ready to say: "This is a hard saying: who can 
hear it ? " This they said after He made the startling 

rrtion in John 6:53, " Except ye eat the flesh of the 
of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in 
y ;•/.." 

The common belief among some Christians is that 
literal [east must be kept up until Christ comes 
for His Bride, because He, under the law and while at 
the Passover Supper with His Jewish disciples said : 
"I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the 
kingdom of God shall come.'' — Luke 22:18. But 
how can this mean His coming for the Church ? since 
she will see Him, and in Luke 17:20.21. He says: 
"The kingdom of God cameth not with turn: 

Neither shall they say! Lo here! or, lo there ! for, be- 
hold, THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YC 

If the kingdom of God cometh not with observa- 
tion, it is absurd and useless to seek it in the observ- 
ance of rites and ceremoni 

Yes, Christian, the kingdom of God, in a sense, is 
within you, and you are not obliged to consume a 
bite of bread or a sip of wine to remind you of Christ, 
for He Himself, by His Spirit, now takes up His 
abode in the b I His people. 

In 1 Cor. 10:16,17, ordinance advocates believe that 
they have ground for their observance of a literal feast 
of bread and wine. Let us examine it. 

" The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the 



108 ABOLISHED RITES. 

communion of the blood of Christ ? The bread which 
we break, is it not the communion of the body of 
Christ ? For we being- many are one bread, and one 
body : for we are all partakers of that one bread." 

In John 6:56, Jesus says, " He that eateth my flesh, 
and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in 
him." This, of course, has no reference to an out- 
ward eating- and drinking-, and yet it is by means of 
the very eating- and drinking- which Jesus here speaks 
of, that the soul must have communion with God. 
The true communion of the body and blood of Christ, 
the real feasting- upon Heavenly Bread is entirely 
inward and spiritual in the heart of those who know 
Jesus in the pardon of their sins, who, by the testi- 
mony of God's Word and Spirit, know that their name 
is written in the Lamb's Book of Life. Likewise, in 
as much as all true Christians partake of this one body 
and one blood, they too, have fellowship one with an- 
other. Therefore, Paul says in 1 Cor. 10:17, "We 
being- many are one bread, and one body : for we are all 
partakers of that one bread." Who would undertake 
to say that he is here speaking- of literal bread ; " for 
we are all partakers of that one bread." Now, does 
Paul here mean "that one bread" to be Christ, or 
bread that some human being- made ? Ag-ain in 
1 Cor. 10:16, he says : "The bread which we break, is 
it not the communion of the body of Christ ? " Who 
will assert that bread which a man or a woman made 
is " the communion of the body of Christ ? " 

In the 2 1 st verse he reproves them thus : " Ye can- 
not drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils : 
ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the 
table of devils." Is there anything- in this language 
to prove that " the cup of the Lord" here referred to 
was a literal cup of earthly wine ? Does the words 
prove that " the Lord's table" here mentioned was a 
literal table with earthly bread upon it ? Paul says to 
the Corinthians : "Ye cannot be partakers of the 
Lord's table, and of the table of devils." Does this 
prove that he meant the Lord's table to be a literal 






ABOLISHED RITES. IO9 

table of bread and wine ? The most wicked men can, 
and perhaps often do, partake of the outward bread, 
and drink from the outward cup of earthly wine, but 
what Christian would claim that such wicked, unsaved 
men could " drink the cup of the Lord" or ' partake 
of the Lord's table ?" Paul plainly declares that they 
cannot, and yet if the "cup of the Lord" and "the 
Lord's table" here referred to were all of the earth, 
earthy, then certainly the vilest of men could have par- 
taken, in contradiction of Paul's assertion that they 
could not, for an infidel could partake of literal bread 
and wine side by side with a Saint ; but side by side 
with a Saint he could not sit at the Lord's table and 
feast upon Him and commune with Him. Xo, no, 
this eating- and drinking-, the sitting- at the table is only 
for those who have been born of the Spirit of the liv- 
ing- God, and whose soul g-oes out in hungering- desire 
for that God who is a Spirit, and who upon the em- 
phatic testimony of Jesus "must be worshipped in 
spirit and in truth" But even if we were to ignore 
this solemn truth, lay it aside, and grant ordinance 
worshipers their claim, that a literal table and literal 
bread and wine was what Paul was upholding" here to 
the Corinthians, still this sweeping fact remains, 
namely, that the occurrence of the rebuke was A. D. 
59, five years before Heb. 9:10, A. D. 64, when carnal 
ordinances are declared abolished. 

Jesus says : " / am the Bread of Life : he that Com- 
eth to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on 
vie shall never thirst. I am that Bread of Life. 
This is the Bread which cometh down from Heaven, 
that a man may eat thereof and not die. I am the 
Living Bread which came down from Heaven : if any 
man eat of this Bread he shall live for ever. * * * 
Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath 
eternal life; and / will raise him up at the last day. 
As the living- Father has sent me, and I live by the 
Father : so he that eateth me, even he shall live by 
me."— John 6:3548.50.51,34.57. 

Surely this is plain enough that the true eating of 



IIO ABOLISHED RITES. 

His flesh and drinking- of His blood are an act of faith, 
and not a literal eating- and drinking of fleshly em- 
blems, and that the only bread which embodies merit 
in this new and spiritual dispensation is the Heavenly 
Bread. 

" It is the Spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth 
nothing : the words that I speak unto you, they are 
spirit, and they are life." — John 6:63. 

Christians who cling to rites and ceremonies main- 
tain that in the nth chapter of 1st Corinthians they 
have a foundation for their custom of observing a 
literal feast of bread and wine. Let us examine that 
foundation. 

In the first place, it is very important to remember 
that the Corinthian feast, or supper, was. observed 
under the law, A. D. 59, just five years before the time 
(Heb. 9:10) when the old code of symbols gave way 
to the spiritual, and manifestly Paul here refers to the 
same feast of bread and wine which Jesus and His dis- 
ciples observed in the Jewish Passover Supper. These 
Corinthians, still being subject to types and shadows, 
was it not but natural that they should still observe 
this feast ? Nothing, however, is ever recorded of it 
again, and in Heb. 9:10, A. D. 64, or five years after 
the observance of this feast, it is declared that "Carnal 
ordinances" were "imposed on them until the time 
of reform ation." Surely rites and ceremonies were 
to be supplanted by the new and spiritual dispensa- 
tion after this " time of reformation " set in. 

Concerning this feast in the nth chapter of 1st Cor- 
inthians Paul says : 

17,20. " Now in this that I declare unto you I praise 
you not, that ye come together not for the better, but for 
the worse. When ye come together therefore into 
one place, this is not to eat the Lord's Supper. 

This instance is the only time the term, The 
Lord's Supper, is used in the Bible. Marvelous, is 
it not, that ordinance advocates build so much upon a 
term used but once in the Scriptures, and even then re- 
ferred to in a rebuke, 



ABOLISHED RITES. Ill 

21,22. " For in eating" every one taketh before other 
his own supper : and one is hungry, and another is 
drunken. What ? have ye not houses to eat and drink 
in ? or despise ye the Church of God, and shame them 
that have not ? What shall I say to you ? shall I 
praise you in this ? I praise you not" 

Surely these Corinthians who had perverted this 
Jewish ordinance into a riotous feast and a drunken 
revelry, could not have been very spiritual or discern- 
ing - . Their insight into spiritual things must have 
been crude, and their ideas of propriety very lax. 
Some of them had been " carried away unto these dumb 
idols" — i Cor. 12:2. Paul speaks of one who, it ap- 
pears, supposed he could be a Christian and " have his 
father s wite" — 1 Cor. 5:1. Yet many Christians to- 
day refer to this feast and these very people as their 
strong" plea for their cherished feast of bread and 
wine. How becoming to such people is Paul's ad- 
monition to the Galatians : "This I say then, Walk 
in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the 
flesh. But it ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not 

UNDER THE LAW." — Gal. 5:16. l8. 

23-26. " For I have received of the Lord that which 
also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the 
same night in which He was betrayed took bread : And 
when He had given thanks, He brake it, and said, 
Take, eat : this is my body, which is broken for you : 
this do in remembrance of me. After the same man- 
ner also He took the cup, when He had supped, say- 
ing, This cup is the new testament in my blood : this 
do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. 
For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, 
ye do show the Lord's death till He come." 

Of course, Paul here refers to the Passover Supper, 
for it is the one Jesus partook of on the night of His 
betrayal, and it is the only one to which Paul could 
have referred. 

Paul, after censuring them for their carnality, tells 
them how Christ and His disciples observed the feast 
on the last occasion, which was all true and in order. 



112 ABOLISHED RITES. 

since they were still under the rites of Judaism and 
observing- them. He does not say that he received of 
the Lord a commandment to keep up this ordinance 
through all following ages of the Church ; that would 
have been contrary to God's mind and purpose in do- 
ing away with rites and ceremonies. 

In the expression, "Till He come/' did not Paul 
mean until Christ should come to the Israelites spirit- 
ually as the Fulfiller of all types, until the kingdom of 
God should come, the time of reformation — the change 
from the fleshly to the spiritual mode of worship ? 

On the expression "Till He come" our ordinance 
friends lay much stress, and claim that it means until 
Jesus comes for the Church (but the text does not say 
so). Moreover, it cannot be made authority for 
keeping up rituals after the abolishment of carnal or- 
dinances as recorded in Heb. 9:9,10, where we read 
the following : 

"Which was a figure for the time then present, in 
which were offered both gifts and sacrifices, that could 
not make him that did the service perfect, as pertain- 
ing to the conscience ; Which stood only in meats and 
drinks, and divers washings [Greek and German, bap- 
tisms] , and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until 
the time of reformation." The expression, Till He 
come" in 1 Cor. 11:26, was made A. D. 59, and the 
change in the dispensations as given in Heb. 9:10 did 
not occur until A. D. 64, five years after. It is very 
important to observe this. 

Does not Luke 22:18 unlock Paul's meaning of 
" Till He comef Jesus there says : " For I say unto 
you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the 
kingdom of God shall come." When did it come 
fully to the Jewish believers ? Was it not when the 
whole typical system gave way to the new and spirit- 
ual, as declared in Heb. 9:10 ? 

Or, another understanding might be taken from 
Christ's words as recorded in Matthew and Mark. In 
Matt. 26:29, Jesus says : " But I say unto you, I will 
not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that 



ABOLISHED RITES. II3 

day when I drink it new with you in my Father's 
kingdom. " Again in Mark 14:25, He says : " Verily 
I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the 
vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom 
of God." These words were spoken by Jesus while at 
the Passover Supper with His Jewish disciples. Who 
would say that Jesus did not here have direct reference 
to a spiritual drinking, either here in spirit, in the new 
dispensation, or in Heaven above ? We think the 
words bear us out in accepting either or both under- 
standings. Surely the words, "Till He come," prove 
that the observance of the ceremony is not obligatory 
after His coming. Did not Christ give His disciples 
ground for believing that this coming would be a 
spiritual one ? " Ye have heard how I said unto you, 
I go away, and come again unto you, 1 ' — John 14:28. 
"I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to 
you." — John 14:18. " If a man love me, he will keep 
my words : and my Father will love him, and we will 
come unto him, and make our abode w t ith him." — 
John 14:23. 

Paul declares : " Christ was once offered to bear 
the sins of many ; and unto them that look for Him 
shall He appear the second time without sin unto 
salvation." — Heb. 9:28. To those who looked for Him 
in spirit, did He not come as John testifies: "We 
know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us 
an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, 
a?id we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus 
Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. Little 
children, keep yourselves from idols." — 1 John 5:20,21. 

Is not the coming of Christ, by which they were to 
know that they were in Him, a spiritual coming ? 
Does not the following imply as much : " At that day 
ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, 
and I in you." — John 14:20. 

The true Christian to whom Christ has thus come 
does not need any outward, visible signs or remem- 
brances in the way of bread and wine, any more than he 
needs the literal cross on his person, or before his eyes. 



114 ABOLISHED RITES. 

" Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; 
but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also" — 
John 14:19. "Ye in me, and I in you." — John 14:20. 
Yes, praise His name, and it is all in spirit. Such 
Christians require no bread and wine to remind them 
of an indwelling Christ. 

It is true that Jesus, at the Passover Supper, said to 
His Jewish disciples, "This do in remembrance of 
me," Luke 22:19; and it is true that Paul while the 
Mosaic law was still in practice said to the Corin- 
thians, while rehearsing- to them how Jesus observed the 
Passover, " This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remem- 
brance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and 
drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till He 
come." — 1 Cor. 1 1,25,26. But neither in the language 
of Christ nor Paul do we find a command that this 
literal eating- and drinking- shall be continued by all 
future g-enerations in the new dispensation, even until 
Christ's final, literal, visible, coming- for His Bride, the 
Church, nor even does the languag-e intimate such a con- 
tinuation of the rite. Yet some who cling- so tenaciously 
to their cherished feast of bread and wine virtually 
teach that the ordinance should be observed until Christ 
comes to take up His Church from earth to Heaven, 
when the righteous dead will be raised, and when 
they, together with the Saints who are then alive will 
be caug-ht up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the 
air. — 1 Thess. 4:16,17. But neither Christ nor Paul 
said that the rite should be observed until that com- 
ing, and those who yet cling to these now barren em- 
blems are simply observing symbols "after the 

COMMANDMENTS AND DOCTRINES OF MEN." 

How fitting are Paul's words right here : "Where- 
fore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of 
the world, why, as though living in the world, 

ARE YE SUBJECT TO ORDINANCES, (TOUCH NOT ; 

TASTE NOT ; HANDLE NOT ; Which all are to 
perish with the using ;) after the commandments and 
doctrines of men" — Col. 2:20,2 1,22. 

In that great and solemn day of Christ's final com- 



ABOLISHED RITES. 



115 



ing- for His Saints, when those who shall be linked to 
the Eternal God by faith alone in Jesus Christ will go 
up, may you and I, dear reader, if alive and remain- 
ing:, not be found eating" bread and drinking- wine as a 
means of remembering- the Lord, but may we be found 
" cojnplete in Hi?n, which is the Head of all prin- 
cipality axd power/' Col. 2:10; "washed from 
our sins in His own blood, " Rev. 1:5 ; may our con- 
science be purged from " dead works to serve the 
living God/' Heb. 9:14 ; may we " be found in Him, 
not having- (our) own righteousness, which is of the 
law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the 
righteousness which is of God by faith/' 
Phil. 3:9; may " God, who commanded the light to 
shine out of darkness" (2 Cor. 4:6), shine in our 
hearts, "to give the lig"ht of the knowledge of the 
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ," 2 Cor. 4:6 ; 
may "the God of hope fill (us) with all joy and 
peace in believing, that, (we) may abound in hope, 
through the power of the Holy Ghost," Rom. 15:13 ; 
may we be found to be of those of whom Jehovah 
said :' " I will put my law in their inward parts, and 
write it in their hearts ; and will be their God, and 
they shall be my people," Jer. 31:33 ; and may we be 
among- those of whom the Master may say: "thou 
hast been faithful over a few things * * * enter thou 
into the joy of thy Lord." — Matt. 25:21. Amen ! so 
may it be. 

Let us consider some plain, indisputable facts con- 
cerning* this Corinthian feast : 

First, It was a literal feast of bread and wine. 

Second. It was a ceremonial yet under the law. 

Third. The old dispensation was yet in force. 

Fourth. The participants made a riotous feast of it. 

Fifth. Paul rebukes them sharply for their car- 
nality. 

Sixth. Paul relates how Jesus took this supper 
with His Jewish disciples. 

Seventh. Thus he proves the ceremony to have 
been the Passover, or a continuation of it. 



Il6 ABOLISHED RITES. 

Eighth, Being- a ceremonial feast of outward em- 
blems, it virtually became of no binding" force five 
years later (Heb. 9:10), which says: " Which stood 
only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and 
carnal ordinances, IMPOSED ON THEM UNTIL THE TIME 

OF REFORMATION. " 

Ninth. No literal eating of bread and wine is ever 
again mentioned after this feast in 1 Cor.. 11, and, of 
course, never after the abolishment of ordi- 
nances as declared in Heb. 9:10, just above quoted. 

Tenth. The very next feast, communion or supper 
we find, is in Rev. 3:20. It is Christ's own and last 
invitation to His Church: "Behold, I stand at the 
door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open 
the door, / will come in to him, and will sup with him, 
and he with me." The nature of this true and now 
only Lord's Supper is certainly so plain that no one 
should associate it with a feast of bread and wine. 

" For the Kingdom of God is not meat and drink ; 
but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the 
Holy Ghost. For he that in these things serveth 
Christ is acceptable to God." — Rom. 14:17,18*. 

" I am the living* bread which came down from 
Heaven : // any man eat of this bread, he shall live 
forever. * * * // is the Spirit that quickeneth; the 
flesh profiteth nothing : the words that I speak 
unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." — John 
6:51,63. 

'This only would I learn of you, Received ye the 
Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing- of 
faith ? Are ye so foolish ? having begun in the 
Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh f " — Gal. 

3:2,3. 

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith 
Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again 
with the yoke of bondage. If ye be led of the Spirit, 
ye are not under the law. // we live in the Spirit, 

LET US ALSO WALK IN THE SPIRIT." — Gal. 5:1,18,25. 

It must be remembered that Paul kept the law, for 
a time, at least, and seemingly with the object of sat- 






ABOLISHED RITES. H7 

isfying some of the Jews. He even observed the Jewish 
rite of purification, Acts 21:23,24,26, and circumcised 
Timothy, * because of the Jews," Acts 16:3, before 
taking- him along- on his tour of the churches. And 
all this, too, after his conversion to the Christian faith. 

His reason for doing" this he evidently states in 
1 Cor. 9:20,21,22,23. " Unto the Jews I became as a 
Jew, that I might gain the Jews ; to them that are 
under the law, as under the law, that I might gain 
them that are under the law ; To them that are with- 
out law, as without law, * * * that I might gain 
them that are without law. To the weak became I as 
weak, that I might gain the weak : / am made all 
things to all men, that I might by all means save 
some. And this I do for the gospel's sake." 

Seemingly it was Jehovah's purpose that the Jews 
were to remain Jews in regard to the Mosaic rituals 
until the time when the people should be led from 
the shadow to the substance. This time is understood 
to he" The time of reformation" recorded in Heb. 
9:10, which, according" to Bible chronology, was A. D. 
64, or thirty-one years after the crucifixion of Christ, 
which occurred A. D. 33. This is according to 
Usher's chronology, or reckoning of Bible dates, and 
is the recognized standard or authority on Biblical 
chronology. 

History informs us that the ceremonial law was ob- 
served, by some at least, until the destruction of the 
Temple by the Roman army under Titus, A. D. 70, 
six years after the time of reformation. Jesus foretold 
its destruction, and God may have thus stripped the 
Israelites of their earthly tabernacle, seeing that they 
were unwilling to give up the typical for the new and 
spiritual. 

The learned Dr. McNair, in his admirable work 
says : " ' In that He saith, A new covenant, He hath 
made the first old. Now that which decay eth and zvax- 
eth old is ready to vanish away. Then verily the 
first covenant had also ordi?ia?ices of divine service, 



Il8 ABOLISHED RITES. 

and a worldly sanctuary.' — Heb. 8:13; 9:1. The 
natural inference from these words is, that one of the 
features peculiar to that covenant of which the apostle 
speaks as ready to vanish away was the possession of 
ordinances. The ' worldly sanctuary ' connected here 
with these has vanished away. It has not only dis- 
appeared in its then form, but nothing" like it is found 
in the new economy — the Gospel Church. Why, then, 
should it be maintained that ordinances must be left, 
that in some shape or other, we must have rites of in- 
itiation and ceremonial worship ? If the language of 
the apostle implies that ritual worship was peculiar to 
the first covenant, and if this covenant when he wrote 
was ready to vanish away, surely the ritual worship 
must have been ready to vanish away as well, and 
should before now have come to an end. Christ gives 
us the New Testament worship, when He says (John 
4:23) 'The hour cometh, and now ts, when the true 
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in 
truth: " 

From Mosheim, the great German ecclesiastical 
historian (died 1755), we learn that Jewish converts 
kept the Passover for two or three centuries. In- 
deed, it seems evident that early converts to Christi- 
anity were prone to cling* to Jewish rites, and slow 
to accept fully the worship in spirit only of the new 
dispensation. Doubtless their long usage of the rites 
of Jewry, and their consequent attachment thereto 
was not readily to be overcome. 

Neander, the historian, says: "As to the celebra- 
tion of the Holy Supper, it continued to be connected 
with the common meal, in which, all members of one 
family joined, as in the primitive Jewish Church and 
agreeably to its first institution. Some have en- 
deavored to find, in 1 Cor. 5:7, a reference to a Chris- 
tian Passover, to be celebrated in a Christian sense, 
with a decided reference to Christian truth, but we can 
find a reference only to a Jewish Passover, which was 






ABOLISHED RITE Iig 

still celebrated by the Jewish Christians. This prac- 
tice of outward Judaism he (Paul applies in a spirit- 
ualized sense to Christians. Purify yourselves from 
the old leaven, for Christ has been offered as our 
Paschal Lamb. Therefore as men purified from sin 
by Christ, our Paschal Lamb, let us celebrate the 
feast, not after the manner of the Jews, but so celebrate 
it that we may be a mass purified in heart from the 
leaven of sin." 

Must we partake of bread and wine, a legal cere- 
mony, claiming* that it must be done as an ordinance 
till Christ's literal coming- for His Church, in the face 
of the following solemn declarations of God's Word, 
recorded in the second chapter of Colossians, five 
years after the ordinance is mentioned for the last 
time f 

6. As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the 

Lord, SO WALK YE IX HIM." 

8. " Beware lest any man spoil you through phil- 
osophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after 
the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." 

10. ' And ye are complete in Him?' 

13,14. "And you, being dead in your sins, * * * 
hath He quickened together with Him, having for- 
given you all trespasses ; Blotting out the handwriting 
of ORDINANCES that was against us, which was con- 
trary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to His 

ft 
cross. 

16,17. " Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or 
in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new 
moon, or of the Sabbath days : Which are a shadow of 
things to come; but the body is of Christ. " 

20-22. ''Wherefore it ye be dead with Christ from 
the rudiments of the world, WHY, as though 
living in the world, are ye subject to ordixaxces, 
( Touch not; taste xot ; HANDLE NOT ; Which all 
are to perish with the using:) after the commandments 
and doctrines of men? " 

u If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things 



120 ABOLISHED RITES. 

which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand 
of God. Set your affections on things above^ not on 
things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your 
life is hid with Christ in God." — Col. 3:1,2,3. 

Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man 
draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him." — 
Heb. 10:38. " 

It is a good thing that the heart be established with 
grace; not with meats, which have not profited them 
that have been occupied therein. We have an 
altar, whereof they have no right to eat which serve 
the tabernacle" — Heb. 13:9,10. 

Some more zealous for the bread and wine than 
others, take it every Sunday, or Sabbath, or every 
" first day of the week, 7 ' or Lord's Day, as others pre- 
fer to name the day. If asked for their authority for 
this they may refer to Acts 20:7 : " And upon the first 
day of the week, when the disciples came together to 
break bread, Paul preached unto them." Nothing is 
said about wine in the chapter. How absurd it is to 
force an ordinance feast of bread and wine into a text 
that gives no room for it, and positively makes no men- 
tion or reference to it. The text gives no authority 
even to say that it was the Passover. 

Acts 2:42, says : "And they continued steadfastly 
in the Apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in break- 
ing* of bread, and in prayers." Why should we under- 
stand this to be other than an ordinary eating? 
Surely nothing* to the contrary is proven by the con- 
text. They " had all things common ; And sold their 
possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, 
as every man had need. And they, continuing daily 
with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from 
house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and sin- 
gleness of heart." — Acts 2:44-46. So it seemingly was 
the custom, since they had all things common, to break 
bread and eat meat from house to house. Of this custom 
of a daily eating from house to house among those who 
" had all things common," can we make an ordinance 
for the church? 



ABOLISHED RITES. 121 

The act of bread-breaking" is mentioned in the Xew 
Testament in passages having- no reference to an ordi- 
nance. See Matt. 14:19; Mark 6:41; Luke 24:30. 

In regard to the breaking of bread, we find no com- 
mand in the above scriptures to make an ordinance of it 
now. Nor does the language of these scriptures refer- 
ring to it say, or even intimate that the breaking- of 
bread was a ceremony of religious significance even 
in that day. But, supposing- that the language of the 
texts which mention the breaking- of bread plainly 
stated that the custom was an ordinance, yet this 
undeniable fact remains, that it was done A. D. 32, 33, 
or 31 and ^2 years before the time of reformation, A. 
D. 64, when ordinances were declared to be void. See 
Heb. 9:10. 

Acts 20:7, says : " Upon the first day of the week, 
when the disciples came tog-ether to break bread, Paul 
preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow, 
and continued his speech until midnight.' ' Nothing 
here states that this eating - was ceremonial. Then in 
the nth verse we read: "When he therefore was 
come up again, and had broken bread, and eaten, and 
talked a long while, even till break of day, so he de- 
parted/ ' This mention of two different times break- 
ing bread occurred at the same meeting, and was 
evidently not a religious ceremony, but simply an 
eating for bodily refreshment. 

The time spent at this meeting was from one day 
until the morning of the following day. The expres- 
sion " when he therefore come up again'" refers to 
Paul coming up from below, where he had gone to a 
young man who, while asleep in the meeting, had 
fallen down below from a third loft window. The 
young man had " fallen into a deep sleep/'* as " Paul 
was long preaching/" and the young man "sunk 
down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft." 
See Acts 20:9. 

On the wilderness march the Israelites ignored faith, 
w r hile Moses was absent/ and made a calf to worship 
— a god that they could see and handle. Just so do 



122 ABOLISHED RITES. 

some of the ordinance people, by their clinging to dead 
rites, ignore the completeness there is in Christ 
alone. Some of them just as really make a god out 
of bread and wine as the Israelites did of the calf. 

It is these outward things, these non-essentials, that 
divide Christians and make sects, not spiritual things, 
There is no danger of believers in our Lord Jesus 
Christ splitting about God, Christ, and the Holy 
Spirit, but about a bite of bread and a sip of wine, or 
the mode of a useless water baptism, they will divide 
into scores of factions, and manifest one toward the 
other a spirit that Satan must be well pleased with. 

This grasping at outward observances often follows 
the absence of spiritual life and power, and is the old 
error of turning from God's fountains of living water 
to broken cisterns which can hold no water. If there 
is in this spiritual dispensation any life to be derived 
from these abolished and now barren ordinances, 
surely the people who still observe them should be 
the most spiritual. But alas ! that is no more the case 
than that we are now in the millennium. 

"But in vain they do worship me, teaching for 

DOCTRINES THE COMMANDMENTS OF MEN." Matt. 

15:9. 

In 1 Cor. 5:6,7,8, we read: Your glorying is not 
good .... Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye 
may be a new lump .... For even Christ our Pass- 
over is sacrificed, for us : Therefore let us keep the feast, 
not with old leaven, .... but with the unleavened 

BREAD OF SINCERITY AND TRUTH. " 

Jesus Himself, the true Passover — the last ,Lamb 
slain, Him whom the bread and wine symbolized, is 
what we now feast upon by faith. Remember the 
words: "I AM THAT BREAD OF LIFE/' 

But there is a Lord's Supper in these last days of 
the Church's Laodicean state, and partaking of that, 
we need no bread made by the hands of women, or 
wine pressed out of grapes, to remind us of that 
gracious Jesus who says : "Behold, I stand at the door, 
and knock : if any man hear my voice, and open the 



ABOLISHED RITES. 123 

door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, 

AND HE WITH ME." — Rev. S'.20. 

That Christ's baptism is spiritual cannot be denied, 
and just as true is it that the true Lord's Supper is 
inward and spiritual, and not carnal or elementary. 
Does not the real, spiritual-minded Christian know 
Christ to have come by the enlightening - and quicken- 
ing- life he realizes in the soul ? Such believers require 
no visible, tangible emblems and ceremonies to re- 
mind them of a living - , indwelling- Christ. The soul 
cannot be fed by material bread and wine, nothing 
outward or tangible can nourish the spirit, "but he 
that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit." — I Cor. 6:17. 

Ritualists often quote i Cor. 11:2 : " Keep the ordi- 
nances, as I delivered them to you," which they infer 
means the Lord's Supper. 

In that charge not a word is said about a supper or 
feast. The original of the word ordinances here, and 
as given in the margin, is traditions. Xow what is a 
tradition ? Certainly not necessarily bread and wine 
and water, but instructions, or historical matter, 
handed down from one generation to another. 

In favor of rituals some may quote the case of 
Zacharias and his wife, who "were both righteous 
before God, walking in all the commandments and 
ordinances of the Lord blameless.'' — Luke 1:6. 

But be it remembered that they were Israelites, 
living itndcr the law, and strictly observing it, looking 
for the coming of the long-promised Messiah. More- 
over Zacharias was one who "executed the priest" s 
office before God in the order of his course, Accord- 
ing to the custom of the priest 's office, his lot was to 
burn ixcexse when he went into the temple/' — Luke 
1 :8,g. So it is plain that in his observance of these 
Jewish ordinances he was simply keeping the Mosaic 
code of ceremonies which we, as believers, free in 
Christ, have nothing to do with. 

Let us turn from all preconceived belief and tra- 
ditional ideas and honestly and humbly consider the 
following Scriptures. If we are earnest, humble seek- 



124 ABOLISHED RITES. 

ers after truth, and desire to meekly follow the Lord, 
we will not be left in darkness, ever remembering that 
" the meek will He guide in judgment : and the meek 
will He teach his way." — Psa. 25:9, 

" The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth 
came by Jesus Christ." — John 1:17. 

" Now we are delivered from the law, .... that we 
should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the old- 

NESS OF THE LETTER." — Rom. 7:6. 

" For Christ is the end of the law for righteous- 
ness to every one that believeth." — Rom. 10:4. 

"Having abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the 
law of command?nents contained in ordinances." — 
Eph. 2:15. 

' Which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers 
washings (Greek and German baptisms), and carnal 
ordinances, imposed on them until the time of refor- 
mation" — Heb. 9:10. 

"Are ye so foolish? having* begun in the Spirit, 

ARE YE NOW MADE PERFECT BY THE FLESH ? * * * 

Now, after that ye have known God, or rather are 
known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beg- 
garly eleme?its, whereunto ye desire again to be in 
bondage ?" — Gal. 3:3; 4:9. 

To prove that the Gentiles only were relieved from 
the Mosaic system nineteen years after Christ, see 
Acts 15:5,6,10,19,24,28,29,31, which reads as follows: 

5,6. " But there rose up certain of the sect of the 
Pharisees which believed, saying, That it was needful 
to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the 
law of Moses. And the apostles and elders came to- 
gether for to consider of this matter/' 

10. " Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a 
yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither 

OUR FATHERS NOR WE WERE ABLE TO BEAR ? " 

19. " Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not 
them, tvhich from among the Gentiles are turned to 

God -'\< 

24. " Forasmuch as we have heard, that certain 

which went out from us have troubled you with words, 



ABOLISHED RITES. 125 

subverting YOUR souls, saying, Ye must be circum- 
cised, and keep the laze : to whom we gave xo such 

COMMANDMENT." 

28,29. "For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, 
and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden tha?i 
these necessary things; That ye abstain from meats 
offered to idols, and from blood, and from things 
strangled, and from fornication : from which if ye 
keep yourselves, ye shall do well." 

31. "Which when they had read, they rejoiced 

FOR THE COXSOLATIOX." 

To prove that the Jews were still keeping the law 
twenty-seven years after Christ, read Acts 21:19-24, 
which reads thus : 

"And when he had saluted them, he declared par- 
ticularly what things God had wrought among the 
Gentiles by his ministry. And when they heard it, 
they glorified the Lord, and said unto him, Thou 
seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are 
which believe ; axd they are all zealous of the 
law. And they are informed of thee, that thou teach- 
est all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to for- 
sake Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise 
their children, neither to walk after the customs. 
AYhat is it therefore ? the multitude must needs come 
together : for they will hear that thou art come. Do 
therefore this that we say to thee : We have four men 
which have a vow on them ; Them take, and purify 
thyself with them, and be at charges with them, that 
they may shave their heads : and all may know that 
these things, whereof they were informed concerning 
thee, are nothing ; but that then thyself also walkest 
orderly, and keepest the law. 93 

Could language possibly be plainer stating that the 
Jewish believers were not fi'eed from the law at this 
time, which was twenty-seven years after Calvary ? 
Xow read the 25th verse of this same chapter, and see 
if it could state more conclusively that the Gentiles 
were not to keep this very same law which, in the verses 
immediately above it, the Jews were observing. 



126 ABOLISHED RITES. 

25. "As touching- the Gentiles which believe, we 
have written and concluded that they observe no 

SUCH THING." 

That in God's mind and purpose there should be 
this distinction between Jew and Gentile for the time 
being- is probably one of the things which Jesus meant 
when He said to His disciples: "I have yet many 
thing's to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. 
Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth , is come, He will 

GUIDE YOU INTO ALL TRUTH." — John 16:12,13. 

Let us consult Hebrews 7th, which shows that the 
old covenant with all its earthly symbols, all its 
fleshly rites and ordinances, was forever put away, 
and that nothing- carnal or symbolical is now needed 
to come between the believer and Christ. 

12,13. "For the priesthood being changed, there is 
made of necessity a change also of the law. For He 
of whom these thing's are spoken pertaineth to another 
tribe, of which no man g*ave attendance at the altar." 

16. " Who is made, not after the law of a carnal com- 
mandment, but after the power of an endless life." 

19. ' For the law made nothing perfect, but the 

BRINGING IN OF A BETTER HOPE DID ; BY THE WHICH 
WE DRAW NIGH UNTO GOD." 

Ag-ain in Hebrews 8th we find this : 7. For if that 
first covenant had been faultless, then should no 

PLACE HAVE BEEN SOUGHT FOR THE SECOND." 

10. " For this is the covenant that I will make with 
the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord ; 
I will put my laws into their mind, and write them 
IN THEIR HEARTS : and I will be to them a God, 
and they shall be to me a people." 

13. " In that He saith, A new covenant, He hath 
made the first old. Now that which decayeth and 
waxeth old is ready to vanish away." 

The 9th chapter of the Hebrews continues thus : 

I . " Then verily the first covenant had also ordinances 
of divine service, and a worldly sanctuary." 10. 
" Which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers 
washings (Greek and German, baptisms), and carnal 



ABOLISHED RITES. 127 

ordinances, imposed ox them until the time of 
reformation/' 

14. "How much more shall the blood of Christ, 
who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself with- 
out spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works 
to serve the living God?" 16,17. " For where a 
testament is, there must also of necessity be the death 
of the testator. For a testament is of force after men 
are dead : otherwise it is of no strength at all while 
the testator liveth." 

" But this man, after He had offered one sacrifice 
for sins tor ever, sat down on the right hand of God. 
For by one offering He hath perfected forever them 
that are sanctified. " — Heb. 10:12,14. 

" Let us go forth therefore unto Him without the 
camp, BEARING HIS REPROACH. By Him 
therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God con- 
tinually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks 
to his name." — Heb. 13:13,15. 

"But as then he that was born after the flesh per- 
secuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is 
now. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith 
Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again 
with the yoke of bondage. But if ye be led of the 
Spirit, *YE ARE NOT UNDER THE LAW."— 
Gal. 4:29; 5:1,18. 

"And they stoned Stephen, calling- upon God, and 
saying - , Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled 
down, and cried with.a loud voice, Lord, lay not this 
sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he 
fell asleep." — Acts 7:59,60. 

The question may well be asked, " Who murdered 
this man of God, and why was it done ? " The Jews 
committed the crime, and it was done because, as they 
said, "This man ceaseth not to speak blasphemous 
words against this holy place, and the law : For we 
have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall 
destroy this place, and shall change the customs which 
Moses delivered us" — Acts 6:13,14. 

Yes, Stephen suffered martyrdom because he taught 



128 ABOLISHED RITES. 

the people that the religion which had consisted in the 
rites and shadows of the Mosaic dispensation must 
give way to the new and spiritual, in which God must 
be worshiped in spirit, and not through carnal types. 
He said to his murderers: " Ye stiffnecked and un- 
circumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the 
Holy Ghost : as your fathers did, so do ye. When 
they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, 
and they gnashed on him with their teeth." — Acts 7: 

51,54-' 

Yes, and human nature — the carnal man — is still 
the same to-day. How true is it that " the natural 
man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God : for 
they are foolishness unto him : neither can he know 
them, because they are spiritually discerned." — 1 Cor. 
2:14. 

The great complaint against Paul was, " This fellow 
persuadeth men to worship God contrary to the law." 
— Acts 18:13. 

At the deathbed of our mother we had an oppor- 
tunity of seeing how useless earthly ordinances are in 
the estimation of a soul about entering Eternity. 

A few hours before she died, and when death had 
already made inroads upon the frail tenement, we sat 
by her side and talked of the change to take place. 
She was calm and reconciled throughout, and when 
we suggested that the end was near, she expressed her 
satisfaction, adding that if we had anything to request, 
to do so. 

Asking if reason was unclouded, and getting an 
answer in the affirmative, we ventured to say : " Well, 
in health and strength you laid aside water baptism ; 
do you want it now ? " ' It is not necessary I " was 
the prompt reply. " In health you put away the 
bread and wine/' we continued; "do you want it 
now?" "it is not necessary!" was the response. 
" But/' she continued, as the tongue was fast becom- 
ing paralyzed in death, "put this text on my tomb- 
stone ; it may cause people to read the Bible ; 



ABOLISHED RITES. I2g 

JOHN 3:16. 
' For God so loved the world, that He gave His 
only-begotten Son, that WHOSOEVER believeth in 
Him should not perish, BUT HAVE EVER- 
LASTING LIFE/ 

and ROM. 10:10. 

F "or with the heart man believeth unto righteousness ; 

and with the mouth co?ifession is made unto salva- 



During the last illness of Sir Matthew Hale, Lord 
Chief Justice of England, and author of various legal 
and religious works who died in 1676, some of his 
attendants proposed to administer the ordinance of 
the bread and wine to him, but he replied {and it is 
given as his last words): 

"No, my Heavenly Father has prepared a 
feast for me ; I will go to my Father's house to 

PARTAKE OF IT." 

The dying words of Thomas Brown (A. D. 1757) 
are given as follows : " People may have a regular 
outside, and be diligent in attending meetings, and yet 
know little or nothing of true religion ; formality and 
externals are nothings ; religion is an internal subject, 
subsisting between Christ and the soul. ,, 

The last words of Lucy Chopping (A. D. 1705) are 
recorded thus: "I want nothing; the Lord is with 
me and His Spirit comforts me. I have bread to eat 
which the world knows nothing- of, and the wine of 
His kingdom refresheth me." 

The closing testimony of Ruth Middleton (A. D. 
1701) was: "Lord Jesus, feed me daily with the 
bread that comes down from Heaven.' ' 

William B. Orvis, the eminent Baptist minister, in 
his work, ' Ritualism Dethroned" says : "To this ex- 



I30 ABOLISHED RITES. 

pose of the origin and meaning- of the pascha and 
agapcz of the Early Church agree the words of Christ : 
'With desire I have desired (i. e., with great long- 
ings I have desired) to eat this Passover with you 
before I suffer : For I say unto you, I will not any 
more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom 
of God.' (Luke 22:15,16.) , 

" Now what is there in these words that sounds like 
teaching that the Passover was then and there ful- 
filled, in the middle of that feast, and that a new feast 
was instituted before that feast concluded ? Not the 
shadow of a hint in that direction. We do not forget 
that Matthew [26:26] says, 'As they were eating, Jesus 
took bread, and blessed it, and brake it/ etc.; but that 
is precisely the way a feast is continued or prolonged, 
for the occasion at least, and not the way to end it and 
establish a new one ! Moses, in establishing the Pass- 
over, was not thus indefinite. Christ says, ' I will not 
any more eat thereof (z. e., of the Passover), until it 
be fulfilled in the kingdom of God/ [Luke 22:16] 
As much as to say, I will then drink the new wine of 
the gospel kingdom with you, and I will give to you 
the heavenly manna, and ye shall sup with me and 
I with you in the coming kingdom. To this also 
agree the 28th to 30th verse [Luke 22] , as soon we 
may see." 

44 That this kingdom of God is the kingdom about to 
appear in glory on the earth, the 18th verse [Luke 22] 
fully establishes. % For I say unto you, I will not drink 
of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall 
come/ Now this form of phrase is never used to 
designate the passing away of all earthly things, and 
the transplanting of the whole Church in the upper 
kingdom — that is termed Christ's coming to take His 
Saints to Himself, that they may see His glory there." 

" And let the Christian reader, bewildered by Epis- 
copacy, Popery, Judaism, or any other sacramentarian 
or ritualistic fantasy, see, in language that cannot be 
gainsayed — carrying demonstration at every point — 
the fact that so far as the Lord's Supper was observed 



ABOLISHED RITES. I3I 

at all by these Christians, it was simply observing- the 
Jewish Passover — called by that name. He that can- 
not see in this simply the Jewish Passover perpetuated, 
and thereby what is termed the Lord's Supper, it 
seems cannot see what is palpable in its very face." 

" But all promises of supping- with Christ, drinking 
the wine new with Him, etc., refer to the fulness of 
Christ received by His Saints here — else you take away 
the Christian's militant kingdom. Hence when Christ 
says, [Luke 22] 28th to 30th verse : ' Ye are they which 
have continued with me in my temptations. And I 
appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath ap- 
pointed unto me ; That ye may eat and drink at my 
table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging- the 
twelve tribes of Israel.' Xow the table is to be as 
literal and external as the thrones, and no more so, 
and none interpret the thrones as external, but spirit- 
ual." 

" Love and fellowship have been everywhere sacri- 
ficed to the sacrament and the form, however much 
every age and nation has differed as to what the form 
should be. Germany was at one time about depopu- 
lated by a bloody war for churches and sacraments. 
And every nation where Christ has been named has 
stained its soil by the bloodshed and martyrdom of its 
truest Saints for this cause supremely. Did Jesus 
Christ come to send a sword among- his followers for 
such causes ? Ah, when shall the churches be truly 
Protestantized and re-formed from the whole ritual 
idolatry of Judaism, Heathenism, and the Papacy ? 
Who will arise to strike down with a mighty arm this 
illusive idolatry of ceremonies and sacraments ? Who, 
in Christ's name, will enter the lists to lift the real 
New Testament baptism from its degradation and 
subsidized vassalag-e to a mere formal worship ? to 
sect and schism ? and to profitless externals ? while 
the true Anointing, the Spirit of life from God, is 
eschewed ? Who will call all churches from their 
worthless clamor about the Lord's table, to that true 
supping- to which Christ invites us ? " 



I32 ABOLISHED RITES. 

" Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke 
upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our 
fathers nor we were able to bear ? — [Acts 15:10.] It 
is truly a marvel that amid all the radical investiga- 
tions of principles and learned discussions of the pres- 
ent day, this subject is left untouched ! and no one has 
arisen thoroughly armed and qualified to tear away 
the veil of darkness that seems to rest upon the great 
mass of nominal Christians, in respect to what are 
commonly termed the Ordinances of the Gospel ! Is it 
not most manifest that not only blindness in part is 
happened to Israel, but that this blindness is also of 
long continuance ? and that, in consequence, a large 
proportion of the nominal Church of Christ is held in 
bondage to rituals and forms ? and that by this por- 
tion of the Church the type is preferred to the antitype 
— the shadow to the substance ? " 

"That the ordinances, as they are termed, viz., 
Baptism and the Eucharist, have been prolific sources 
of heresy, dissension, and schism, from the days of the 
apostles until now, no one acquainted with the history 
of the church will deny." 

"Revivals of religion are impeded, and succeeded 
by wars about baptism and terms of communion, and 
ever and anon new sects are arising which make these 
their watchword, — the ground of their separate or- 
ganization, and the basis of their hope of Heaven ! 
Aye, in most Protestant sects they are made tests of 
Christian fellowship, boundaries of Christian charity 
and confidence.' ' 

" Ah, how many will superstitiously wear their long 
faces, and put on their holy airs around the com- 
munion table, or at the baptismal altar, while the 
weightier matters of the law — to do justly, to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with God, are left out of 
the account in their daily life. They will harp upon 
the subject of baptism to the day of their death, and 
will come around the communion table as oft as it is 
spread before them, as a very important and solemn 
duty, and yet take no pains to learn the claims of 



ABOLISHED RITES. I33 

God and the way of holiness at other times or in other 
ways. Now, all this we regard as superstition, mock- 
ery, idolatry — a perfect abomination in the sight of 
God, and ruinous to the temporal and eternal interests 
of men." 

Having abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the 
law of commajidments contained in ordinances ; for to 
make in Himself of twain one new man, so making- 
peace/ [Eph. 2:15.] Allow me to turn your attention 
for a moment to the incongruity of mingling types with 
anti-types — the shadow with the substance ; aye, the 
dark shadows of the ceremonial law — shadows which 
characterized the former dispensation — with the glo- 
rious effulgence that beams forth from the new dispen- 
sation. By universal admission, ordinances are sym- 
bols — i. e. 9 emblems or types of other things." 

" Men talk about the ordinances of the gospel, — its 
positive institutions, — as though the gospel had estab- 
lished some new positive institutions. There was a 
ceremonial law under the Mosaic economy distinctly 
marked ; yea, most accurately and laboriously defined; 
but Jesus Christ abolished it in His death : ' having 
abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the law of 
commandments contained in ordinances ;' and it were 
preposterous to suppose He would go directly and 
establish another ceremonial law ; for this would be 
no gain. It would only secure the recurrence and 
perpetuity of the same evils complained of before. 
And how hard is it for mankind to possess themselves 
fully of the idea that, in respect to outward things, 
under the gospel dispensation, nothing is law but that 
which is evidently required by the law of love I " 

" No one w T ill pretend that any of the modes of 
worship, or of giving religious instruction, are sacred 
ordinances in the sense in which that term is ordinarily 
used. Hence, there are few or no dissensions arising 
concerning them. But you clothe any ritual, or cere- 
monial, or mode of worship with the investiture of 
sacredness, and if that ritual, etc., be not most ac- 
curately defined, there will be no end to the bigotry 



134 ABOLISHED RITES. 

and superstition, the hair-splitting- and stupid idolatry 
connected therewith. And this is certainly one objec- 
tion to the supposition of a New Testament cere- 
monial law. If there be one, it is so undefined as to 
leave room for all these vagaries, and for a thousand 
and one notions and caprices concerning- it." 

" There is no possible evidence from aught that 
Jesus Christ did or said that He understood the pur- 
port of His last Passover feast with His disciples as 
anything- more than His final celebration of that Pass- 
over with them. There is no evidence that any new 
feast or sacrament was instituted there. Every part 
of the ceremony was after the form of the Jewish 
Passover festival. Jesus Christ announced it as the 
Passover, before He celebrated it, in His instructions 
to His disciples, etc., and nowhere does He call it by 
any other name ." • 

"Paul's lang-uag-e in I Cor. 11:20-34, we admit, 
seems much more like recognizing- the establishment 
of an ordinance than anything recorded of the sayings 
of Jesus Christ upon the subject ; but it is most mani- 
festly Paul's intention only to recapitulate the teach- 
ings of Jesus Christ on the subject, in which we have 
seen there was nothing that even looked like a com- 
mand, or the institution of a new ritual. Moreover, 
a close analysis of Paul's language, here and else- 
where, shows that the rite was not observed as in 
modern times — but that a full meal was eaten, as in 
the Jewish Passover, or as in their feasts of charity, 
celebrated from house to house — and the whole scope 
and aim of the apostle appears to be to remonstrate 
against a gross and sensual observance of those feasts, 
or of the Passover. Thus did Paul to the Jews, be- 
come a Jew, and to the Romans, a Roman, telling 
first the Jews that Christ, our Passover, is slain for us 
(1 Cor. 5:7), that they should therefore purge out the 
old leaven, and be a new lump, leavened with the 
grace of God." 

"And now, we ask, is it not remarkable, if Jesus 
Christ intended to leave an affectionate, loving 



ABOLISHED RITES. I35 

memento of His sufferings and death, to be symbol- 
ized as sacred through all future ages, that the beloved 
disciple John — who dwells far more extensively upon 
the concluding scenes of our Saviour's life, as though 
He, of all others, would certainly have them memo- 
rialized, — says not one word about any instituted sup- 
per, but mentions simply, as a matter of history, His 
going to the Passover, His washing the disciples' feet 
— and then records His last sayings — His inimitable 
prayer, etc.? " 

" Is not this an evidence that the reason Paul 
notices it was to turn the disciples away from Judaism, 
which they were, in that very observance, still cling- 
ing to, and urging them in all they did to remember 
Christ, and to be proved worthy of Him, lest they 
eat and drink damnation to their own souls ? And 
does not Christ, in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel 
tell us what the true supper is ? And so also in Rev. 
3:20, and Paul, in i Cor. 5, quoted above ?" 

"And we talk about union and fellowship, as 
though fellowship in a sacrament were true fellowship, 
forgetting that it may be but the merest emptiness, 
hollow-heartedness and mockery, after all. Is the 
ritual fellowship of Papists or High Church Protest- 
ants worth anything ? What is a sacrament that 
touches the body, or which, we physically observe, to 
the spiritual baptism (of love) and the spiritual bread 
(Christ) which we eat when we come into spiritual 
union with Christ, and all the Saints ? How oft does 
the sacrament eater (or baptizer) befool himself with 
a conceit of his extra and exclusive righteousness, 
thereby attained and manifested, while he sets at 
naught Christ's true spiritual followers." 

" Rites and ordinances will not characterize the 
Millennium, as whoever lives to that day will surely 
learn. The substance will supplant the shadow then. 
They will neither be Baptists nor Pedobaptists then ; 
isms will be unknown, and Christ will be all in all. 
By one Spirit all Saints will be baptized into one body. 
(1 Cor. 12:13.) The ministration of death will then 



I36 ABOLISHED RITES. 

have utterly passed away, and the ministration of the 
Spirit will be completely triumphant and universal." 
" In the life of Gregory the Great, it is related that 
a certain woman, when he gave her the eucharist with 
the words, the body of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve 
thy soul, laughed at the form, and when asked the 
reason, she replied, because he called that the body of 
Christ, which she knew to be bread that she had made 
with her own hands a little while before. " 

Thomas Evans, in A Concise Account" says: "As 
there is one Lord and one faith, so there is but one 
baptism, of which the water baptism of John was a 
figure. Respecting the communion of the body and 
blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Society of Friends 
believes that it is inward and spiritual — a real partici- 
pation of His divine nature through faith in Him and 
obedience to the power of the Holy Ghost, by which 
the soul is enabled, daily, to feed upon the flesh and 
blood of our crucified and risen Lord, and is thus 
nourished and strengthened. Of this spiritual com- 
munion the breaking of bread and drinking of wine by 
our Savior with His disciples was figurative, being 
that set forth in Revelation (3:20)- ' Behold, I stand 
at the door, and knock : if any man hear my voice, and 
open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup 

WITH HIM, AND HE WITH ME.' " 

Green and Wells, in "The Millennial Church" say: 
" The many different opinions and jarring contentions 
that have long existed among professors of Christian- 
ity, concerning these two ceremonies, are so many 
evidences that their most strenuous votaries have fixed 
their views on mere shadows and signs, instead of 
embracing the real spirit and substance of Divine life 
to which they alluded. The great importance which 
has long been attached to the external performance of 
these ceremonies, and the ages of contention which 
have darkened and bewildered the world on these 
subjects, first originated in anti-Christian darkness, 



ABOLISHED RITES. 1 37 

after the Church had lost the knowledge of the true 
work of God. The violent contentions among- Chris- 
tian professors of former ages upon this subject, 
instead of promoting brotherly kindness, Christian 
charity, and heavenly love, often led to cruel hatred, 
blood, and slaughter ; no rational Christian can sup- 
pose that Christ would establish an institution to pro- 
duce wrath and strife, and that, too, among Chris- 
tians. " 

William Farel, of Switzerland, on a poster, in 1535, 
said: "In the first place, every believing Christian 
ought to be very certain that our Lord and Savior, 
Jesus Christ, the great Bishop and Pastor, ordained 
of God, has given His body and soul, His life and 
blood, for our sanctification by a perfect sacrifice. To 
renounce this sacrifice as if it were insufficient, to re- 
place it by a visible sacrifice, namely, the Mass, as if 
Christ had not fully satisfied for us the justice of 
His Father, and as if He were not the Saviour and 
Mediator, would be a terrible and damnable heresy. " 

" Yes, by the great and admirable sacrifice of Jesus 
Christ all outward and visible sacrifice is abolished. 
Christ, says the Epistle to the Hebrews (which I en- 
treat everybody to read diligently), ' was o?ice offered. 
By one offeriiig He hath perfected forever them that are 
sanctified? Christ offered once and not often. . . . If the 
sacrifice is perfect, why should it be repeated ? Come 
forward then, ye priests, and answer if ye can ! " 

Bergner (died A. D. 1088), says : " Christ does not 
descend from Heaven, but the hearts of the faithful 
ascend devotionally to Him in Heaven. The true, the 
imperishable body of Christ, is eaten only by the true 
members of Christ in a spiritual manner. ' Though 
we have known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth 
know we Him no more.' " 

CEcolampadius, German Reformer (died A. D. 
1531), says: "Christ, who said to the people of 



I38 ABOLISHED RITES. 

Capernaum, * The flesh profiteth nothing/ rejected by 
these very words the oral manducation, or chewing, 
of His body ; therefore He did not establish it. There 
is danger in attributing too much to mere matter ; 
since we have the spiritual eating, what need of the 
bodily one ?" 

Zwingli, Reformer (died A. D. 1531), says: "Jesus 
says that to eat His flesh corporeally profiteth nothing, 
whence it would result that if outwardly eaten, He 
had given us in the supper a thing that would be use- 
less to us. The soul is fed with the Spirit, and not 
with the flesh." 

" The Acts and Monuments" speaking of John Wick- 
liff's work of reformation, which is given as A. D. 
1372, says: "The world, leaving and forsaking the 
lively power of God's spiritual Word and doctrine, 
was altogether led and blinded with outward cere- 
monies and human traditions." 

Mrs. Catherine Booth, wife of the founder and 
leader of the Salvation Army, of London, England, 
says in her book, "Popular Christianity .•" '*It is a 
calamity deeply to be deplored that men should thus 
put the form in the place of the power, but they have 
always been doing so. It is only another species of 
that idolatry which has prevailed from the foundation 
of the world." 

" Christians often say to me, when I put this view 
before them, ' Oh, but you have no authority to remit 
the Supper, because the Lord said we were to take it 
in remembrance of Him till He come!' I answer 
that He left the taking of it at .all perfectly dis- 
cretional ; and as to its continuance, that entirely de- 
pends on which coming He alluded to." 

" Friends, and many others of the most spiritual 
and deeply taught Christians of all times, have be- 
lieved that He then referred to His coming at the end 
of the Jewish dispensation." 



ABOLISHED RITES. 



139 



P. Martyr, in his disputations at Oxford, England, 
A. D. 1549 to 1542, said : " Cyprian saith, * The eat- 
ing" of Christ is our abiding in Him.' ' 

Elizabeth Stamford, about A. D. 1517, said to her 
Catholic examiners at London: "Christ feedeth and 
nourisheth His Church with His own precious body, 
that is the Bread of Life coming down from Heaven. 
This is the worthy Word that is worthily received and 
joined unto man to be in one body with Him. Sooth 
it is that they be both one, that they may not be 
parted. This is the wisely deeming of the holy sacra- 
ment, Christ's own body ; this is not received by chew- 
ing of teeth, but by hearing of ears and understanding 
with your soul, and wisely working thereafter/' 

Claudius Monerius, a Frenchman, burned at Lyons, 
A. D. 1551, being asked, "What believe you of the 
sacrament ? Is the body of Christ in the bread or 
no?" replied: "I worship Jesus Christ in Heaven, 
sitting at the right hand of God the Father." 

John Lambert, burned in 1538, addressed the fol- 
lowing to the King of England: "This eating and 
drinking is nothing but such true faith and belief as is 
showed. Wherefore as Christ saith, ' Whoso eateth 
my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life/ 
even so doth He say, ' He that believeth on me hath 
everlasting life/ And St. Augustine, agreeable to the 
same, treating upon John, doth say, ' Why dost thou 
prepare thy teeth and belly ? ' Believe and thou hast 
eaten. It is good to establish the heart with grace, 
and not with meats. And St. Augustine, assenting to 
the same, doth say in a sermon, ' This is not the bread 
which goeth into the body, but that bread which doth 
satisfy the substance of our soul. He who eateth in- 
wardly in spirit, not outwardly ; he that eateth in 
heart, and not he who cheweth with teeth/ ' 

Roger Coo, an aged British martyr, burned in 1555, 
said to his cruel enemies : " Our Lord said, ' My flesh 



I4O ABOLISHED RITES. 

is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed, He 
that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth 
in me, and I in him ; ' and the bread and wine doth 
not so." 

John Frith, an Englishman, martyred in 1533, said : 
"The ancient fathers before Christ never believed in 
the gross and carnal eating of Christ's body, yet not- 
withstanding they did eat Him spiritually and were 
saved, as Adam, Abraham, Moses, etc., all of whom 
ate the body of Christ and drank His blood as we do. 
But this eating and drinking was spiritual, pertaining 
only to faith, and not to the teeth. They were all 
' under the cloud ' and drank of the Rock which fol- 
lowed them ; ' that Rock was Christ.' Moses also 
prefigured Him by divers means, both by the manna 
which came down from Heaven and also by the water 
which issued out of the rock. Nor is it to be doubted 
that the manna and the water had a prophetical 
mystery in them" 

Mrs. Prest, an English martyr, burned in 1558, said 
before giving up her life : " If denying to worship that 
breadly god be my martyrdom, I will suffer it with 
all my heart. It is nothing but very bread and wine ; 
and you ought to be ashamed to say that a piece of 
bread, which ferments and molds, and which may be 
eaten by mice or burnt in the fire, is changed into the 
body of Christ/ ' 

The Catholic dignitary in 1549 said to Eelken, the 
martyr, "What do you hold concerning the sacra- 
ment?" His answer was, "I know nothing of your 
baked god." To Fye, also a martyr, it was said, 
" Will you not do such a mercy as to receive this 
bread and wine? " He replied, " For your bread and 
wine I do not hunger ; food is prepared for me in 
Heaven." Fye was strangled and then burned. Before 
his death the persecutors led him to the ship where 
Eelken lay beheaded. 



ABOLISHED RITES. I4I 

Martin Luther, the Reformer (died 1546), says: 
"This much I confess: if Dr. Karlstadt or anyone 
else could have convinced me five years ago that there 
was nothing" but bread and wine in the sacrament, he 
would have rendered me a great service. The Word 
of God is higher than all things, the soul cannot do 
without it, but it may do without the sacrament ; then 
will the true Bishop Himself feed thee spiritually. 
All laws and ceremonies should be free in the church, 
and not be done on compulsion. " 

" If divers men should use a diverse rite, let not one 
judge or condemn another, but let every one abound 
in his own sense ; and let us all savor and judge the 
same things, though in forms we act diversely ; for 
outward rites, as we cannot want them either as meat 
and drink, so neither do they commend zis to God, but 
only faith and love commend us to Him. Therefore 
let Paul be heard here that the kingdom of God is not 
meat and drink, but righteousness, peace and joy in 
the Holy Spirit. And so no rite or form is the king- 
dom of God, but faith within us." 

"The sacrament, the altar, the priest, the Church, 
we may pass them all by ; that Word of God, which 
the bull of the pope condemned, is more than all these 
things. The soul may dispense with the sacrament, but 
it cannot live without the Word. Christ, the true 
Bishop, will Himself supply your spiritual feast.' 1 

Robert Barclay, Quaker Reformer (died A. D. 1690), 
says : '"I am the Bread of Life/ saith He. * He that 
cometh to me shall never hunger ; and he that believ- 
eth on me shall never thirst/ (John 6:35.) And 
again, ' For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is 
drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh 
my blood/ saith Christ, ' dwelleth in me, and I in 
him/ (John 6:55,56.) This cannot be understood 
of outward eating of outward bread ; and as by this 
the soul must have fellowship with God, so also, so 
far as all the Saints are partakers of this one body 
and one blood, they come also to have a joint com- 
munion. Hence the apostle, in this respect, saith that 



142 ABOLISHED RITES. 

they, ' being" many are one bread, and one body :' 
(i Cor. 10,17), and to the wise among- the Corinthians 
he saith, * The bread which we break, is it not the 
communion of the body of Christ?" (1 Cor. 10,16.) 
This is the true and spiritual supper of the Lord, 
which men come to partake of by hearing the voice of 
Christ, and opening the door of their hearts, and so 
letting Him in according to the plain words of the 
Scripture, Rev. 3:20, ' Behold, I stand at the door, 
and knock : if any man hear my voice, and open the 
door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, 
and he with me.' So that the supper of the Lord, and 
the supping with the Lord, and the partaking of His 
flesh and blood, is no ways limited to the ceremony 
of breaking bread and drinking wine. We certainly 
know that the day is dawned in which God hath dis- 
missed all these ceremonies and rites, and is only to 
be worshiped in spirit, and that He appears to them 
who wait upon Him, and that to seek God in these 
things, is, with Mary at the sepulchre, to seek the liv- 
ing among the dead : for we know that He is risen and 
revealed in spirit, leading His children out of these 
rudiments, that they may walk with Him in His light : 
to whom be glory forever. Amen." 

In Denominations of the World, by V.#S. Miller, is 
the following: "With respect to the other rite, we 
believe that communion between Christ and His 
Church is not maintained by that or any other ex- 
ternal performance, but only by a real participation 
of His divine nature through faith ; that this is the 
supper alluded to in Rev. 3:20. Where the substance 
is attained, it is unnecessary to attend to the shadow, 
which doth not confer grace, and concerning which 
opinions so different and animosities so violent have 
arisen. The Rellyanists are the followers of Mr. 
James Relly. He first commenced his ministerial 
character in connection with Mr. Whitefield, and was 
received with great popularity. Upon a change of 
his views, he encountered reproach. He preached a 
finished salvation, called by the Apostle Jude ' the 



ABOLISHED RITES. I43 

common salvation.' Many of his followers are re- 
moved to the world of spirits, but a branch still sur- 
vives. They are not observers of ordinances, such as 
water baptism and the sacrament ; professing- to be- 
lieve only in one baptism, which they call an immer- 
sion of the mind or conscience into the truth by the 
teaching- of the Spirit of God ; and by the same Spirit 
they are enabled to feed on Christ as the Bread of Life, 
professing that in and with Jesus they possess all 
things/' 

Joseph Phipps, in True Christian Baptism and 
Communion, says : " If, as the apostle declares, ' The 
king-dom of God is not meat and drink; but righteous- 
ness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost ' (Rom. 
14:17), it is not bread and wine, which are meat and 
drink. Nevertheless, we condemn not those who are 
conscientious in the use of them." 

"He is not a real Christian who is only one by 
profession and form ; neither is that the baptism nor 
the communion of the gospel, which is outward and 
ceremonial ; but he is a Christian who is one in- 
wardly, and that is the true baptism and the true 
communion which is of the heart, in the spirit, and 
not in the letter or outward form." 

Henry Ward Beecher says : " I thought I w r ould 
say a few w r ords this evening", in answer to several 
questions that have been propounded to me on the 
subject of The LoroV s Supper, or, The Communion of 
the Last Supper. The disciples had made preparation, 
you will recollect, being" sent by the Master, to cele- 
brate the Passover — perhaps the most conspicuous and 
important of the three great festivals which the Jews 
were accustomed to celebrate every year marking" their 
great national release from bondage. And we have a 
very accurate account, derived from authentic Jewish 
writing's, of the whole mode in which the Passover was 
accustomed to be celebrated. The Paschal Supper, 
the mode of its preparation, administration and par- 
ticipation, was all very minutely put down in the Jew- 



144 ABOLISHED RITES. 

ish books, so that we are not left without a knowledge 
of the particulars of that gathering- when Jesus and 
His disciples sat eating the Paschal Supper." 

They were all Jews in feeling as well as in nation- 
ality. Our Master was accustomed to enter into 

ALL THE PROPER ACTS OF JEWISH WORSHIP without 

questioning. He worshiped according to the customs 
of His own people, in the synagogue, everywhere/ ' 
' They were in the act of eating the Passover — the 
unleavened bread, the bitter herbs, and the prepared 
lamb. Then, at the close of this Paschal Service, the 
remains being there, the Saviour gave new significance 
to the bread. Handing a fragment to every one that 
was present, he said, 'This is my body, which is 
broken for you/ They came into the meaning of it 
afterward. And then He took the cup, which had 
been used already in the Jewish Passover of the Paschal 
Supper, and again gave it to them, as it were a fourth 
time and said it was His blood shed for them." 

There was no command that it should be observed 
every day. There was no command that it should 
be observed every week. THERE WAS NO COM- 
MAND THAT IT SHOULD BE OBSERVED AT 
ALL. It was celebrated more or less frequently just 
according to circumstances. It was probably more 
than two hundred years before it began to be a sacra- 
ment, or a ceremony. It was full three or four hun- 
dred years before it ever began to be called an awful 
service, a solemn service, a service peculiarly filled 
with awe." 

"Afterward it became corrupted. It became a sacra- 
ment. Men began to surround it with various cere- 
monies. And then they began to teach that it was a 
special channel through which otherwise incommuni- 
cable blessings were sent down. Then it began to be 
taught that the Lord's body and blood were abso- 
lutely in the bread and wine." 

Joseph J. Gurney says: ' It is the Spirit that 
quickeneth? as our Saviour Himself has taught us, 



ABOLISHED RITES. I45 

' the flesh profiteth nothing ; ' and Christianity is dis- 
tinguished by a spiritual supper, as well as baptism. 
To partake of this supper is essential to our salvation. 
We can never have a claim on the hopes and joys set 
before us in the gospel unless we feed, by a living" 
faith, on the Bread which came down from Heaven, 
and giveth life to the world — unless we ' eat the flesh 
of the Son of man, and drink His blood/ Now they 
who partake of this celestial food are fellow-members 
of one body ; they are joined together by a social 
compact of the dearest and holiest character, because 
they all commune with the same glorious Head. 
They are one in Christ Jesus ; and when they meet in 
solemn worship — Christ Himself being present — they 
are guests, even here, at the table of their Lord, and 
drink the wine 'new,' with Him 'in His kingdom.' 
May this be the happy experience of all who read this 
volume, whether they use or disuse what is called the 
sacrament of the supper ! " 

Thomas Clarkson, in his admirable work which 
treats on the disuse of rites, says: "Verily, verily, I 
say unto you, Moses gave you not that Bread from 
Heaven ; but my Father giveth you the true Bread 
from Heaven. For the Bread of God is He that 
cometh down from Heaven, and giveth life unto the 
world.' (John 6:32,33.) ' Then said they unto Him, 
Lord, evermore give us this Bread. And Jesus said 
unto them, I am the Bread of Life : he that cometh to 
me shall never hunger ; and he that believeth in me 
shall never thirst.' " (John 6:34,35.) 

" It appears that in the course of these and other 
words that were spoken upon this occasion, the Jews 
took offence at Jesus Christ, because He said He was 
the Bread that came down from Heaven ; for they 
knew He was the son of Joseph, and they knew both 
His father and mother. Jesus, therefore, directed to 
them the following observations : ' I am that Bread of 
Life, Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, 
and are dead. This is the Bread which cometh down 
from Heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. 



I46 • - ABOLISHED RITES. 

I am the Living* Bread which came down from 
Heaven : if any man eat of this Bread, he shall live 
forever: and the Bread that I will give is my flesh, 
which I will give for the life of the world. The Jews 
therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can 
this man give us His flesh to eat? Then Jesus said 
unto them, Verily; verily, I say unto you, Except ye 
eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, 
ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, 
and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life ; and I will 
raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat 
indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eat- 
eth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, 
and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and 
I live by the Father : so he that eateth me, even he 
shall live by me. This is that Bread that came down 
from Heaven; not as your fathers did eat manna, and 
are dead : he that eateth of this Bread shall live for- 
ever?" (John 6:48-58.) 

"This Bread, then, or this Body, is of a spiritual 
nature. It is of a spiritual nature, because it not only 
giveth life, but preserveth from death. Manna, on 
the other hand, supported the Israelites only for a 
time, and they died. Common bread and flesh nour- 
ish the body for a time, and it dies and perishes ; but 
it is said of those who feed upon this food, that they 
shall never die. This bread or body must be spiritual 
again, because the bodies of men, according to their 
present organization, cannot be kept forever alive. 
But their souls may. The souls of men can receive 
no nourishment from ordinary meat and drink, that 
they should be kept alive, but from that which is 
spiritual only. It must be spiritual again, because 
Jesus Christ describes it as having come down from 
Heaven.'' 

" This Supper, which consists of this manna, or 
Bread, or of this flesh or blood, may be enjoyed by 
Christians in various ways. It may be enjoyed by 
them in pious meditations on the Divine Being, in 

WHICH THE SOUL OF MAN MAY HAVE COMMUNION WITH 



ABOLISHED RITES. 147 

the Spirit of God, so that every meditation may 
afford it a salutary supper, or a celestial feast. It 
may be enjoyed by them when they wait upon God in 
silence, or retire into the light of the Lord, and 
receive those divine impressions, which quicken and 
spiritualize the internal man. It may be enjoyed by 
them in all their several acts of obedience and regard 
to the words and doctrines of our Saviour. Thus may 
men every day, nay, every hour, keep a communion 
at the Lord's table, or communicate, or sup, with 
Christ. ,, 

John Allen, in his " State Churches" says : " At the 
feast of the Passover, it was customary among" the 
Jews for the master of the house to take unleavened 
bread, then giving thanks to God, to break it and 
give to the family ; likewise to take the cup, give 
thanks, and distribute it to the household. This our 
Lord fulfilled according to the law ; but at the last 
Passover Supper He also drew their attention from the 
paschal lamb and the deliverance of their forefathers, 
the objects originally commemorated by the Passover, 
to the breaking of His own body, and to the deliver- 
ance of man from sin, being the great purposes typi- 
fied by both." 

" The practice of breaking bread and drinking wine 
together, as a religious ceremony, prevailed exten- 
sively in the early periods of Christianity, and was ob- 
served in various modes, according to the views of 
different churches. And this observance has been for 
ages, touching its nature, effects and mode of celebra- 
tion, the cause of more bitter controversy between 
Roman Catholics and Protestants and of more blood 
being shed than any other matter of difference. " 

" For the long period of nearly two hundred years 
from the time of Henry IV., about A. D. 1400, to the 
reign of James I., it was made the principal test of 
religious faith, both in England and on the continent 
of Europe ; and the Roman Catholics more especially, 
but not exclusively, when they possessed the chief 
secular power, condemned and burned as heretics, 



I48 ABOLISHED RITES. 

without distinction of age or sex, those who differed 
from their own views upon it." 

"It was a common practice at the execution of 
heretics to fasten about their necks scraps of scripture 
and other evidence of their supposed guilt found in 
their possession, that the whole might be burnt to- 
gether. Of all the matters which in England were 
condemned as heresies and punished in this awful 
manner, the differences of opinion with respect to the 
bread and the wine have been by far the most promi- 
nent and fruitful of victims." 

"The earliest Christian writers scarcely allude to 
this rite. Tertullian speaks of the celebration of the 
Eucharist in connection with the meals of the early 
Christians ; as we read of the i breaking of bread ' in 
private houses and public assemblies. Irenaeus con- 
tended, about th'e year 200, that the Eucharist should 
be regarded as * a sacrifice ; ' thus opening a floodgate 
through which the Church was deluged with error. 
Public prayers were followed by oblations of bread, 
wine and other things ; every one offering according 
to his ability ; and partly from hence, all those who 
were in necessity derived their subsistence.'' 

" The Eucharist was generally received once a week, 
or oftener, in the Second and Third Centuries, by the 
diligent and zealous. Ambrose seemed to regard 
every celebration to be as great a mystery and miracle 
as the incarnation ! The idea being now generally re- 
ceived that this rite was a ' sacrifice/ altars were sub- 
stituted for tables, and other sacrificial appendages 
followed. Priestcraft found in this idea a strong 
support, and grasped it with eagerness. " 

" The sign of the cross was introduced. Pomp and 
splendor were displayed, and rich vessels of gold and 
silver were deemed necessary articles. The word 
* mass ' was not known in the primitive Church, nor is 
it found in the works of Augustine, Chrysostom, and 
other writers of the Fourth Century. They termed the 
ceremony ' the Supper of the Lord/ ' the mystical sup- 
per or table/ ' the Eucharist/ ' celebration of the sac- 



ABOLISHED RITES. I49 

rament,' ' the Lord's board/ ' oblation/ 'communion/ 
1 mystery/ etc. Certain Christians, called Aqnarii, 
used water at the Eucharist instead of wine. The Ebi- 
onites did the same. Others used water mingled with 
wine, which w r as said to denote the union of the 
Church with Christ. This was the general practice. 
Some substituted milk, honey, or grapes for wine. 
The Ascodnitse and Messalians, or Euchites, held that 
the sacrament of bread a?id wine did Jieither good nor 
harm and rejected its use. They subsisted through 
several hundred years/' 

"The Eucharist had already been administered to 
infants ; it was now given to dead persons. It formed 
a part of the divine worship, was used to consecrate 
every religious act, and was occasionally celebrated at 
the tombs of martyrs, whence followed masses tor the 
dead. 

" The bread and wine were held up to the view of 
the people before distribution, that they might gaze 
on it with reverence. The bread was usually broken 
to signify the breaking of the body of Christ. At 
other times it was pierced with a spear and said to be 
immolated. With the remains of the Eucharist, and 
with other oblations, it had long been usual to hold 
the ' agapae, or feasts of charity,' being a liberal colla- 
tion of the rich to feed the poor ; but this practice giv- 
ing rise to various abuses was prohibited in the Sixth 
and Seventh Centuries." 

" The Canon of the Mass, instituted by Pope Greg- 
ory the Great, about the year 620, for the celebration 
of the Eucharist, occasioned a remarkable change by 
the ' introduction of a lengthened, pompous ritual.' ' 

" It was still generally performed in the language 
of each particular country, and the first time it was 
openly said in Latin appears to have been at the 
Council of Constance, by the Pope's legate in 681. 
The administration of the sacrament was now deemed 
the most solemn and important part of public devo- 
tion, and was everywhere embellished with a variety 
of senseless appendages. The burning of incense re- 



ISO ABOLISHED RITES. 

ceived general sanction. Charlemagne made some 
attempts to stem the torrent of superstition, but with 
little success," 

" For a very long* period the sacrament of the bread 
and wine was viewed and employed by the great body 
of Catholics as a sort of charm or amulet, to heal 
bodily diseases in men, or in cattle ; to insure success, 
and avert calamities, as well as to administer truth to 
the soul. Voyagers carried with them consecrated 
bread as a pledge for their preservation. It was often 
administered with absolution to the sick or dying, and 
was then termed the viaticum, or provision for their 
journey into the next world. It was sometimes even 
buried with the corpse. These notions were warmly 
urged by the corrupt and selfish priests." 

" It had been common to pronounce the consecra- 
tion of the Eucharist audibly and intelligibly, that the 
people might hear, and answer 'Amen/ but in the 
Tenth Century the contrary practice of ' intonation/ or 
pronouncing the services in a low voice y began to be in- 
troduced to render them more mysterious." 

" By the corporation and test acts, passed in the 
reign of Charles II, the taking the ' sacrament of the 
Lord's Supper ' was made necessary to the holding of 
all places of trust in England and Wales — the object 
being the exclusion of dissenters — an object which was 
enforced for a century and a half. These acts never 
extended to Scotland. The effect in England was to 
make the ceremony, in many cases, a mere passport 
to office for the unscrupulous and irreligious. The 
high-church notion of self-restricted authority appears 
in the following, under date of 1820 : * A person not 
commissioned from the bishop may break bread and 
pour out wine, and pretend to give the Lord's Supper ; 
but it can afford no comfort to receive it at his hands, 
because there is no warrant from Christ to lead com- 
municants to suppose that, while he does so here on 
earth, they will be partakers in the Saviour's heavenly 
body and blood.' Hence all such observances by 
non-conformist ministers are vain and fruitless." 



ABOLISHED RITES. I5I 

Basil (died A. D. 379) says: "There is an intel- 
lectual mouth of the inward man, at which he is fed 
who partakes of the Word of Life, which is the Bread 
that came down from Heaven." 

Augustine (died A. D. 43c?) says: "Why dost 
thou prepare thy teeth and thy stomach ? Believe 

and thou hast eaten. To believe on Him is to eat the 
Living" Bread ! The Bread of our heart is that whereon 
he feeds who eats inwardly, not outwardly. To 
abide in Christ, and to have Christ abiding in us, is 
to eat that meat and to drink that drink." 

Pres. C. G. Finney says : " I had infinitely rather 
receive the Quaker view of ordinances, than that of 
the (exclusive) Baptists." 

Dr. Ira Bristol says: "The more of the external 
rites we employ, the more we approximate the cus- 
toms of idolatry, and the less, the nearer the worship 
of Heaven." 

Origen (died A. D. 253 ?) says: "There is in the 
New Testament a letter that kills him that doth not 
spiritually mind the tilings that are spoken ; for if thou 
observest this saying - literally, ' except ye eat my 
flesh and drink my blood/ the letter killeth." 

Chrysostom (died A. D. 407) says: ' ' The flesh 
profiteth nothing,' i. e., my words are to be under- 
stood spiritually, because he that heareth them car- 
nally profits nothing- ; for they are not to be judged 
of by the outward appearance, simply as the words 
without any further consideration, but the mystery is 
to be perceived by the inward eyes of the soul, i. e., 
spiritually. Christ is always with us." 

Cyprian (died A. D. 258?) says: "The eating of 
Christ is our abiding in Him ; and our drinking is, as 
it were, a certain incorporation in Him. None eateth 
of this Lamb, but such as be true Israelites — /. e.. 
true Christian men, without color or dissimulation. 
He is the food of the mind, not of the stomach. 



152 ABOLISHED RITES. 

What meat is to the flesh, real faith is to the soul : we 
whet not our teeth to eat, but we break holy bread 
with a sincere faith." ' 

Gregory Nazianzen (died A. D. 389 ?) says : " Shall 
they keep me from the altars" (z. e., from the outward 
supper), but I know an altar of which the thing's seen 
are types and figures. The whole is the work of the 
mind, and the ascent to it is by divine contemplation. 
On this altar I will offer an acceptable sacrifice and 
oblation, and whole burnt-offering-s, so much better 
than those now offered, as the truth is better than the 
shadow. " 

Dr. J. A. Tabor says : " It cannot be too often re- 
peated that the king-dom of God cometh not with ob- 
servation — is not an exhibition, but an internal, vital 
principle. Keep simplicity — keep spirituality : but to 
do this we must come to the Divine Architect of the 
soul, and ask Him to build up that in the beauty of 
holiness! " 

Besse says : " If wicked men do not partake of the 
communion of the body and blood of Christ, who yet 
do partake of the outward bread and wine, it plainly 
follows that outward bread and wine is not the com- 
munion of the body and blood of Christ.' ' 

Ignatius (died A. D. 107 ?) says : " So the logos, or 
Word, is diversely alleg-orized, being - termed meat, and 
flesh, and bread, and milk, and nourishme?it ; all is the 
Lord, to be enjoyed by us, who have believed in 
Him/' 

Adam Clarke says: "■' Whoso eateth my flesh and 
drinketh my blood hath eternal life/ etc., can never be 
understood of the Lord's Supper." 

In " Conversations on Religious Subjects" S. M. Jan- 
ney says : " All the ceremonies of the Mosaic law were 
observed by Jesus Christ ; for that law was not abro- 
gated till after His crucifixion. The Passover was 



ABOLISHED RITES. I 53 

one of these ceremonies, and had a more immediate 
reference to Himself than any of the others. It is not 
surprising", then, that He should, while celebrating- this 
feast, endeavor to turn the attention of His followers 
to the spiritual meaning of it, by speaking of that 
Bread which comes down from Heaven and nourishes 
the soul, and of that wine which He would drink new 
with them in His Father's kingdom. He told them, 
as often as they ate and drank, to do it in remem- 
brance of Him, and thereby they would show forth 
His death ' till He come J But did He not come to 
them again to rule and to reign in them, when, after 
waiting- at Jerusalem, they were all baptized with the 
Holy Spirit ? This was the fulfilment of His prom- 
ise : 'I will not leave you comfortless : I will come to 
you/ and ' Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the 
end of the world/ This was to them the second ap- 
pearance of Christ. And to every regenerated soul 
He still appears in spirit, and is that substance and 
life which fulfills all the shadows and ceremonies of 
the law." 

That the rites and ceremonies of Judaism were by 
some of the early-century Christians again taken up is 
shown and proven in this work, but that there were 
also some then and all along down the line of the cen- 
turies who testified against them is also shown and 
proven herein. But we now insert more on the same 
line, proving that a very numerous class of the early 
Christians rejected rites and ordinances, some of them 
discarding them in part, others entirely, while others 
seem to have recognized them as non-essentials, 
though possibly in some instances, at times, observing 
them. 

"Ritualism Dethro?ied" concerning Tatian (of the 
Second Century) , says : " It may be added that Tatian, 
an Assyrian by birth, and an eminent scholar, having 
read a portion of the Scriptures, became convinced of 
the truth of their teachings, and embraced Christian- 
ity. He proceeded to Rome, and put himself under 



154 ABOLISHED RITES. 

the teaching's of Justin Martyr, and like him became 
eminent for piety and temperance in all things ; like 
him rejected the Jewish rituals, dissuaded from the 
baptism of water and all use of wine. After the mar- 
tyrdom of Justin, he became a teacher in Rome for 
some years, and afterwards returned as a missionary 
of Christ to his own country/' 

Irenseus (died about A. D. 200) says : " The Mosaic 
law was not established for righteous men. Abraham, 
without circumcision, and Lot, receiving" salvation 
from God ; they had the meaning of the law written in 
their hearts ; but when righteousness and love to God 
became extinct in Egypt, God did necessarily reveal 
Himself, that thou mightest know that man doth not 
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth 
out of the mouth of God. God, standing- in no need 
of anything- from man, speaks thus by Moses, * And 
what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly.' '' 

Neander, the historian, says of the reaction brought 
about by the efforts of Marcion : "A reaction of the 
Christian consciousness reasserting- the independence 
acquired for it by the labors of Paul against a new 
combination of the Jewish and Christian elements ; a 
reaction of the Protestant spirit against the Catholic 
element now swelling- in the bud." 

Manes, or Mani (martyred about A. D. 277), was 
an eminent scholar, mathematician and astronomer. 
After embracing- Christianity, he devoted his time and 
energy to the promulgation of the truth as he saw it. 
Concerning* Manes, one historian says: " By traduc- 
ing ritualists and heresy-hunters he was much ma- 
ligned, but his real character shone all the more 
brightly because of the dark background in which his 
enemies soug-ht to place him. Notwithstanding all 
this traduction he became the acknowledged head of a 
long line of self-denying and non-ritualistic followers, 
among- whom were included a great number of wit- 
nesses for a holy life and conversation, for temperance 
in all things, and death to earthly ambitions." 



ABOLISHED RITES. I 55 

History testifies that the non-ritualists continued 
to advocate that doctrine in Asia, Eastern Europe and 
Northern Africa until the Fourth Century. Mark, a 
native of Memphis, Egypt, who testified against ritu- 
alistic tendencies, went to Spain to preach. The effort 
seemed successful and embraced people of learning 
and piety. Among them was Priscillian, bishop of 
Avila. For his doctrine Priscillian was banished 
from Spain, but returning again he was tried with 
others of his associates ; testimony against himself 
being extorted by the rack. He was executed at 
Treves, A. D. 385. 

The Euchites, or " praying ones/' the historical rec- 
ords indicate, rose in the latter part of the Third Cen- 
tury, and in the early part of the Fourth Century. They 
were an interesting class of non-ritualistic pietists. 

The Paulicians flourished from A. D. 600 to A. D. 
900. They were a protesting and non-ritualistic 
people that arose in Armenia, Western Asia, and were 
most prominent in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. 
Of them Xeander, the historian, says: "They were 
for restoring the life and manners of the Church to 
apostolic simplicity ; they maintained that by the 
multiplication of external rites and ceremonies in the 
dominant Church the true life of RELIGION had de- 
clined. They combated an inclination to rely on the 
magic effects of external forms, particularly the sac- 
raments. They maintained that it was by no means 
Christ's intention to institute the baptism by water as 
a perpetual ordinance, but that by baptism He meant 
only the baptism of the Spirit, for by His teachings 
He communicated Himself as the Living Water for 
the thorough cleansing of the entire human nature. 
So in respect to the supper : They held that the eating 
of the flesh and drinking of the blood of Christ con- 
sisted simply in the coming into vital union with Him 
through His doctrines, His Word, which were His true 
flesh and blood. It was not sensible bread and sen- 
sible wine, but His words, which were to be the same 
for the soul that bread and wine are for the body, which 
He designated as His flesh and His blood. " 



I56 ABOLISHED RITES. 

The Orleanists, of France, arose about A, D. 1000. 
Of them Neander, the historian, says: " With a 
spiritual baptism they held also to a spiritual Euchar- 
ist. In the year 1022 the king* himself (Robert of 
France) came to Orleans, where a numerous synod 
had assembled, to try and pass sentence upon the sect. 
Fallen upon during- one of theii meeting-s, of which in- 
formation had been given by Arefast, all who were 
found present were arrested, tog-ether with Arefast 
himself, and conveyed in chains before the spiritual 
tribunal, where also the king" and queen assisted. 
When Arefast presented before them the doctrines 
they had taught him, they no long-er hesitated to avow 
openly their adherence of them, but declared, * Think 
not that this sect, because ye have so lately come to 
the knowledg-e of it, has sprung- up within a short 
period. For a long- time we have professed these 
doctrines, and we expected that these doctrines would 
one day be admitted by you and by all others ; this 
we believe still. We have a higher law, one written 
by the Holy Spirit in the inner man ; we can be- 
lieve nothing- but that which God, the Creator of all 
thing-s, has revealed to us. Do with us as you please. 
Already we behold ouf King - reigning* in Heaven, 
whose right hand shall exalt as to an eternal triumph, 
and crown us with celestial joys/ ' 

About the Gerhardites, Neander, the historian, 
says : " From the year A. D. 1027 to 1046, there ap- 
peared in Turin a sect, with Gerhard at their head, 
who discoursed thus : ' We have a priest, not that 
Roman one, but another, who daily visits our breth- 
ren, scattered throug-h the world ; and when God be- 
stowed Him on them, they received from Him, with 
great devoutness, the forgiveness of sins. Besides 
this priest, who is without the tonsure, they know of 
no other, nor did they acknowledge any other sacra- 
ment than His absolution.' Thus we find in this sect, 
as in that at Orleans, the consciousness of a fellowship 
extending- throug-h different countries. By their 
priest, they doubtless meant the Holy Spirit, which 



ABOLISHED RITES. 1 57 

formed the invisible bond of fellowship, and bestowed 
on them the inward clearing- from remaining- sin, and 
the inward consecration of the divine life. This in- 
ward worki?ig of the Divine Spirit stood to them in the 
place of all sacraments" 

" The archbishop of Milan sent soldiers and arrested 
a number of these ; they were led to the stake, and the 
choice given them either to bow before a cross erected 
on the spot, and confess the Catholic faith, or die, 
Some chose to do the former, but the majority plung-ed 
into the "flames. " 

Concerning- the Catharists, about A. D. 1200, Ne- 
ander, the historian, says : " They soug-ht to point out 
the opposition between the Old Testament and the 
Xew, and appealed to the opposition between the Ser- 
mon on the Mount and the Mosaic law. They said of 
the members of the dominant Church that they had 
sunk back on the foundation of the Mosaic law. They 
contended not only ag-ainst infant baptism, with argu- 
ments always presenting themselves against the institu- 
tion as apostolical , but also against water-baptisM" 

"They, the Catharists, Arranians, Paulicians, etc., 
awaked in the ignorant and uninstructed people, who 
had been misled by incompetent priests to place the 
essence of religion in a round of ceremonies, a more 
lively interest in spiritual concerns. They called up 
in them the idea of a divine life, presented religion to 
them more as a matter of inward experience, and, per- 
haps, as this was the particular bent of the Paulicians, 
made them better acquainted with the Scriptures." 

In ' Mil man s History of Latin Christianity " is 
found the valuable record of a people known as mys- 
tics, and here evidence is continued that the Lord has 
always had a people to witness for the truth while 
surrounded by the blindness and big-otry ot a popu- 
lar and persecuting* Christianity. The work says : 
" From 1247 to 1272 the Franciscan Bertholdt, of 
YYinterthur, preached with amazing- success through 
Bavaria, Austria, Moravia, and Thuringen. The dis- 



I58 ABOLISHED RITES. 

sidents under their various names were everywhere. 
At the beginning- of the Fourteenth Century Alsace was 
almost in possession of the brethren and sisters of the 
free spirit. They were driven out and scattered ; but 
expulsion and dispersion, if it does not multiply the 
numbers, usually increases the force and power of 
such communities. Mysticism within the Church 
strove to fill the void caused by their expulsion. Of 
these Mystics the most famous names are Rysbroeck, 
of Cologne, Master Eckhart, John Tauler and Nicolas, 
of Basle. The life of Tauler will show us the times 
and the personal influence of these men." 

Concerning the Lollards, of A. D. 1350, the Reli- 
gious Encyclopedia says : " Lollards, a religious sect, 
arose in Germany about the beginning of the Four- 
teenth Century, and were so called from Walter Loll- 
ard, a German preacher (as Perrin, in his history 
of the Waldenses, calls him), a man of great renown, 
who came to England in the reign of Edward III 
(about A. D. 131S). " 

" Lollard and his followers rejected the sacrifice of 
the mass, extreme unction and penance for sin, argu- 
ing that Christ's sufferings were sufficient. He is 
likewise said to have set aside baptism as a thing of no 
effect. Among the articles required by law, guiding 
the inquisitors in their examination of the Lollards, 
one was : ' Whether an infant dying unbaptized can 
be saved?' This the Lollards constantly asserted in 
opposition to the Church of Rome, which decreed that 
no infant could be saved without it. Fox says that 
among the errors they were charged with were these : 
1 That they spoke against the opinion of such as think 
that children are damned who depart before baptism, 
and said that Christian people are sufficiently baptized 
in the blood of Christ, and need no water.' ' 

T. Seebohm, in a work entitled, " The Oxford Re- 
formers" (Oxford, England, A. D. 1520), says: " Eras- 
mus sought to bring out the facts of Christ's life as 
the true foundation of the Christian faith, instead of 



ABOLISHED RITES. I59 

the dog-mas of the scholastic theology. At length, he 
writes : ' Read the New Testament through ; you will 
not find in it any precept which pertains to ceremonies. 
Love alone He calls His precept. Ceremonies give rise 
to differences ; from love flows peace. And yet we 
burden those who have been made free by the blood 
of Christ, with all those almost senseless, and more 
than Jewish constitutions.' ' 

William Allen, after a tour in Russia, where he met 
a sect known as Malakans, or Duhobertzi, says of 
them: " They believe in the Holy Scriptures and in 
the divinity of our Lord and Saviour as fully as we do 
ourselves, and that the influence of the Holy Spirit is 
not withheld from any. They believe that the only 
true baptism is that of Christ with the Spirit, and re- 
ject water-baptism as unnecessary. They consider that 
the communion with Christ is wholly spiritual, and 
make no outward ceremony. The Malakans extend 
on the east even to the Caucasus Mountains, and, 
counting- all their societies, Grellet says they ' number 
about one hundred thousand.' " 

Georg-e W. Green well says : " The ordinance breth- 
ren do not deny Christ, they only want to add some- 
thing- to Christ. He says, ' Ye are complete in Him/ 
and to add anything- to Christ is to deny His com- 
pleteness. Some add one thing- and some another, but 
the wrong thing is to add anything- at all. I think 
there has been enough said to show that these ordi- 
nances are only types and shadows, and that we are 
complete in Christ without them. So - let brotherly 
love continue/ and lay hold on eternal life, and let us 
seek God with our whole heart and ' worship Him in 
spirit and in truth/ " 

Another writer says : " God in the types of the last 
dispensation, was teaching" His children their letters. 
In this dispensation He is teaching- them to put these 
letters together, and they find that the letters, arrange 
them as we will, spell Christ; nothing but Christ/ , 



l6o ABOLISHED RITES. 

As the history of denominations, the experience of 
congregations, and that of individual Christians has 
amply proven, again and again, that true union can- 
not exist in an organization, or in an assembly* or 
among individual Christians where ordinances are 
made a test of fellowship, and as these ceremonies, 
because of the various and conflicting opinions held 
concerning them, have ever been the cause of conten- 
tion and division, their observance or non-observance 
should be left optional with each individual Christian 
in the Association. Those who desire to observe them 
should be allowed liberty to do so, and by any mode 
they prefer, and those who do not want to observe 
them should be allowed equal liberty of conscience in 
not observing them. 

Any officer, minister or other member of an organ- 
ization or a congregation who advocates a course 
contrary to liberty of conscience to all, or who advocates 
any particular mode of administering or observing 
any fleshly ordinance or ceremony, to the injury of 
peace and unity, should be deemed guilty of sowing 
discord and causing division. 

Where true Christian union is expected to exist, no 
dissension or controversy whatever on the subject of 
ordinances should be tolerated,* either on the part of 
officers, ministers or lay members. Unless this course 
is insisted upon and maintained, peace and unity will 
not — cannot exist. Controversy is the opposite of union. 
History has repeated itself again and again in proof of 
this fact. Some Christians insist that the only way 
to maintain true Christian union without contro- 
versy and discord, is to observe no ordinances. 

We have no hesitancy at all in saying that if true 
fellowship in the Spirit, and real Christian union 
cannot be attained without dropping ordinances, then 
let them be laid aside entirely. Water cannot wash 
away sin ; bread and wine nourish not the soul. 



JAN 18 1910 



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